МИСЛЕЊЕ
The weakening of language’s power: social media, communication’s noises’ and superficial relationships I am always amazed by how much art can make us reflect about life in different angles, and also by how much discussing about it - whether it is a painting, a movie or a book - with other people allow us to expand even more our points of view and thoughts.
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ue to social distancing on account of coronavirus, I tried other means of being close to my loved ones, and one of the best ones turned out to be through art. Every week, each one of us chooses a movie and after watching it, we share our thoughts and feelings about it. It has been so nice to do it and happily expect the movie discussing day, from which always come out long life learnings that I’ll carry along forever.
In one of the past discussions, the chosen movie was “Anomalisa”, a stop motion adult animation directed by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson. The movie goes over a man who is a customer service expert who went to Ohio to give a lecture about his field of expertise. At the hotel where he is staying, he meets a woman who is going to turn his world upside down (or not). I am not going to tell you much more of the story, because I dare to say it is a good movie to watch without knowing much about, just to be aware of the fact that it is a mind blowing masterpiece, very well written and directed. However, the main point is that our main character, Michael Stone, is clearly tired of superficial relationships,
14 - VOICES
talks and people. For him, everyone looks the same and are not individuals with their own personality. Thus, it made me think a lot about human communication, especially after all gadgets that supposedly allow us to communicate more and better, besides being able to show “our true self” on social media. Don’t you have the impression that most of the times we greet people, either on the street, at home or in the elevator, we are simply recognizing each other, but not deeply talking about anything? Don’t get me wrong, I still think this recognizing ritual is great, because I am saddened when no one answers my good morning greeting, for example. Nevertheless, I feel social media worsened this type of superficiality and indifference in our interactions: instead of looking in people’s eyes and giving them a smile, we spit out words we don’t even remember we said with our eyes sticked to our phone screens. Our lack of attention with other people’s feelings and with what they have to say seems to be increasing, because we are so worried with what popped up on our phone that we don’t notice a big part of what is happening next to us.
