Digital technology has invested all social uses to the point of saturating them with solicitations, even summons. There is hardly anything other than conversation and the physical proximity it supposes that still opens up a salutary moment of freedom.
“An hour of conversation is worth more than fifty letters,” noted Madame de Sévigné in her… Correspondence spread throughout the last third of the 17th century. What would the most famous letter writer in France say in the digital age? She would certainly be speechless when faced with a language enslaved to a new technology; when faced, also, with new behaviors.
There is little or no time for writing, not even for conversation. The screens, everywhere, create a convivial facade with, as the latest avatar, the smartphone. Yesterday’s landline which, over the course of calls, heard parents and children one after the other on the receiver, maintained the family bond. The smartphone, which only recognizes the voice of its master, too often and jealously makes each call, each message personal, to the peril of living together.
Because in the beginning there was flesh and flesh became words… “A real anthropometric upheaval is taking place,” worries sociologist David Le Breton. “The beating heart of human relationships, the conversation that began millions of years ago is drying up. With the digital revolution, interpersonal exchanges have lost in quality what they gained in quantity. Without the real presence of the other, these exchanges are reduced to the surface of words that compete in banality. This disintegration has increased after 2010 and the widespread use of smartphones. In the absence of real face-to-face contact with one’s interlocutors, of palpable reciprocity, of a unique atmosphere, conversation often remains a caricature of itself: knowing where the other is in order to tell them where one is not…”
