lancewig.com

Do you really care what I had for breakfast?

Some people may say, “No, not really.” but if we lived in the same house you may be interested.

It’s the small talk that builds relationships. This is something that’s often missing from the social communication on the web.

I’ve been using Skype for some time now to talk with language partners in China. The free video chatting software gives me a tiny window into another culture and let’s me build relationships without ever leaving the house. It’s fairly certain that I wont be able to visit China any time soon. The price of gas is much too high for my budget. But the question is: Will I need to? My language partners often send photos and tales of their land which gives me every opportunity to learn. As I talked to my pal Kevin this morning, I showed him some of my Flickr photos and suggested that he show me some pictures of his home town.

As I hung up and begin to make breakfast, I thought that it would be nice to show a basic aspect of my life to someone who is half way around the world. How much effort does it take really?

Then new thoughts about energy and my own family in this country began to fill my head.

Send me an intelligent email.

Visiting with family and friends in person is getting harder with the cost of gas. It’s not like we can travel 100 miles every weekend to stop by everybody’s house. We can use the internet to communicate if we could only get better at using it. When email came out, many of the older generation scoffed at it saying it was “too informal”. They often become the victims of forwarded chain letters. My mom would tell me that she got some letter titled, “Send this email to 10 more people . . .” but she never got anything that actually said how that person was doing.

I do get emails from my parents which are very well written like an old fashioned letter would be. I applaud them for embracing this free technology and saving stamps.

TXT Me!

I often get instant messages from one of my family members that say things like “wusup” or “ “. After that, intelligent speech is hard to find. I do however have anther colleague that I communicate with often. He is highly technological. We share lots of ideas, links, favorite sites and concepts through AOL instant messenger.

Visit my blog why don’t you.

A lot of people have started blogs, but many don’t get past the first entry that says “Hello World.” A blog takes effort to write and the concept escapes many of people. I write one because I know that I can say something once and all of my friends and family will be able to read it. I don’t have to keep writing the same story over and over in an email.

I mentioned Wordpress to my wife and she took right off and created her own blog for her monthly book-club group. She has only basic computer experience so I was thrilled that she got a blog up and running without my help. Now she has members commenting on books and conversing together. Even though the club meets in person once a month, they can use the blog to build on their relationships.

Communicate like you do when we’re face to face.

It began to occur to me that we need to learn to have a normal conversation through the internet like we do in person. Many people don’t seem to know how to do that. My pal in Arizona has this down pat. We even have scripts on our machines to take screen shots to demonstrate what we are looking at.

So how do we communicate better? Perhaps we can get past the “wussup” and funny cat photos part and actually mention what we had for breakfast. Maybe we can share photos on Flickr of what we did today. Maybe we can start a free and simple WordPress blog to share stories with all our friends and family. Perhaps we can start a Facebook account to connect with friends.

Gas is running out but our spirit does not need to.

As it gets harder to travel around, we can still use the internet to do a vast amount of things. We can buy products, rent movies or sell old junk in our closet. We can also keep a close relationship with people without having to take a car trip. All we have to do is start with the little stuff like breakfast and work our way up.