Communication - It's all in the Thumbs!

My husband and I sat in the waiting room of a doctor's office last week while our daughter was having her wisdom teeth extracted. I pulled out my book and settled in for what I thought would be about an hour of uninterrupted reading time! Heaven! The lobby was about half full of couples like us, waiting for their children to come out of surgery. As I began to read I realized how quiet it was. It was too quiet. So quiet, the quiet was deafening. I looked up and looked around. Each and every one of the people in that room except for me was rapidly moving their thumbs, up and down, and side to side on their phones! I looked to my left and sure enough, there was my husband, rolling his little thumbs over the silver ball on his blackberry!

The signs in waiting rooms used to say, Please don't talk on your Cell Phone. Today there's no need for that sign because people don't TALK on cell phones. They text and they email. How many of us have visited the phone store lately or called the phone company to change our plans....reduced our talking minutes and increased the amount of texts?

We don't ask people who they're calling. We ask them who they're texting! We say have you "talked" to so and so today. Our response, Yes, I have. But our definition of "talk" has changed. It really means we've communicated through texts and emails. We haven't really "talked" to them.

How many of your children have text you from another part of the house? There's no need for them to get up and WALK into the kitchen when they can let their fingers do the walking!

Webster defines talk as to converse or communicate by speech. Discuss, express, utter.

Obviously Webster didn't have a cell phone because these days communication is all in the thumbs!