You've Got Mail

 Oh my, I can so vividly remember the excitement, the joy even, of opening the AOL app and hearing "you've got mail"- the eventual reward for waiting for the dial up to reach across time and space to connect to a world that had been so remote only a year previous.

I, like so many others, found new friends (connections) in those early chat rooms - reading the conversations of strangers and finding familiar threads of commonality.  For a couple of years, I even had a couple of steady email friends who brought my loneliness into companionship and helped me also discover my sequestered voice again.

Even 22 years later, the Tom Hanks / Meg Ryan movie enchants me.  I try to watch it at least once a year and to use it as a guidepost into my own growth.  This year, as I watched it, I was caught off guard to a new fact that I have seemingly ignored for a long time - Joe and Kathleen were "cheating" on their relationships.  The dark and often crippling reality of "internet cheating" loomed so brightly, I almost couldn't finish watching the movie.  How have I truly enjoyed the "magic" of this movie for so many years and turned a blind eye to the fact that the characters were not full of sweet hope and integrity?  It's simple really:  we take from situations only the facts and sometimes glossed over facts that we want to.  Let me clarify - in our own individual perspectives, we only see or hear what we want to see and hear.  For over 20 years, I have needed the magic of Joe and Kathleen's sweet love story to guide me, to give me hope that I too could find my soul mate through the digital world.

As I watched Kathleen's relationship with her boyfriend end, I heard myself shouting, "if you had only put as much effort into that relationship as you did your online relationship. . .".  When did I become so critical of this movie?  I'm curious if I will ever go back to seeing this movie as my standard "go to movie' of sweet innocence and hope.

The other thing that truly stood out to me this year was the opening of the movie when Frank is telling Kathleen about Freecell having to be removed from government computers due to so much lost productivity, I laughed.  I knew the foreshadowing in this quote the very first time I saw the movie; but wow, how true it is today.  It is the constant connectivity that is truly damaging education and workplace productivity.  How many times have I been in a store needing to check out or needing assistance only to see an employee so busy on a phone?  How many times a day do I remind my students to remove ear buds or put away phones?  

Remember that old song "Video Killed the Radio Star"?  I often ponder all the things that internet has killed:  bookstores, video stores, movie theaters - just to name a couple.  The digital age has completely altered the world in all industries.  While I truly love having such amazing access to video / audio on demand and the ability to share instantly aspects of my life - we have lost something, too.  We have lost the ability to stop and enjoy what we have in front of us because we can so quickly replace it with some thing new.  We have lost the ability to visit with a friend, family member or neighbor because we are distracted by the latest Tik Tok trend or Candy Crush level.  We have lost the ability to adapt to shortages because we can easily order from Amazon and get something the next day.  Persistence, patience and apathy.......yes, we are in a Brave New World, but I mourn all that we have lost.