Juan Villoro
Digital communication is so effective that we have the luxury of not using it. Faced with the possibility of responding at any time, the message is postponed until it is forgotten. Being able to chat at all hours allows us to do so at none.
I mention this circumstance to give way to another, related to the round of generations and their plural misunderstandings. Many friends regret that their children, grandchildren, or nieces and nephews do not answer in the family chat. “Their last message was from June 21!” complains the relative who was hoping to resolve something on the 22nd.
Has the sense of time changed for those entering adulthood? Is this a phenomenon specific to certain regions? After talking to a wide variety of people, I can say that the phenomenon goes beyond localisms and social classes.
It is not a matter of education because this behavior affects students in public or private schools, Catholic or secular, and children of authoritarian or liberal parents. This reveals that we lack digital pedagogy. Interaction with applications, portals, and platforms does not depend on learning in the world of facts but on the logic of virtual reality itself.
When a computer specialist praises a tutorial on the screen, he usually says: “It has a very intuitive system”. That means that the human being understands it without too much difficulty, but, above all, that he understands it without interacting with another human. The new intuition is that of the man or woman in front of the machine, which confirms that we are on the threshold of the posthuman.
Let us return to unanswered messages. In today’s environment, it is easier for the father who sends numerous Whatsapp messages to his daughter to qualify as obsessive than for her to qualify as indifferent.
As I commented earlier, communication is so simple that it is not necessarily used or valued. When long-distance calls were expensive, sons would call collect from Acapulco to say “I’m here” and hang up immediately. Today they could send you a message from every toll booth, something so easy to do that it is forgotten.
Obviously, some young people answer all messages immediately, and every generation has exceptional people who study classical Greek or respond to adults.
I am not writing these lines out of old age spite but with the desire to understand a behavior in depth.
The discretionary use of communication has to do not only with the excessive ease of exercising it. Most young people lack options to become independent in a dignified manner. When parents make the mistake of starting an argument by saying, “When I was your age…” they ignore the fact that circumstances have changed radically. Moreover, social permissiveness has increased, and many families allow their children to live at home with their partners.
Faced with the alternative of suffering in a rooftop room in exchange for not seeing their parents or putting up with them a few meters away with relative freedom, most young people opt for the latter.
This has led to excesses of cohabitation. A couple of years ago, a Catalan couple won the first trial to expel from the house the son who had been there for more than three decades without washing the dishes.
How to move away without moving out? The digital environment has fostered an isolation not too dissimilar to autism. Someone talks to you, but you don’t answer; you’re there, and you’re not in reality.
It seems to me that the refusal to answer messages has a deep cause, not sufficiently analyzed. Young adults forced to remain at home with their parents find a variant of independence in mutism and disconnection. This is not necessarily due to a lack of empathy but a desire for self-affirmation. Not answering is a peculiar but legitimate way of being with yourself. The right to solitude is exercised by avoiding people close to you.
Do I give too much importance to a practice that, for other people, is nothing but a sign of rudeness? Are we facing an irreversible isolation or a rebellious example of free will? If your life is dependent, independence is exercised by not answering.
“You idealize that your children ignore you,” a friend told me. She may well be right.
This article raises questions; trained in WhatsApp, I don’t expect an answer.
This was published in Spanish by Reforma on June 30, 2023
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