I grew up in a neighborhood where your neighbor would call out for you on Christmas day with containers filled with Filipino Spaghetti, Macaroni Salad, and Buko Salad, and where finding someone’s lost cat was as much your responsibility as your own. It was a place where you are a part of a community that extends generosity when they have an oversupply of harvested backyard fruits. This also means that as neighbors, you are responsible for looking out for one another’s property in the event of accidents or misfortunes. Or in a case of a mail or parcel delivery, you are the one to tell the person that no one is at home and you can take it for your neighbor.
As a kid, when I wanted to play, I just let my neighbors in our house (with permission from my ma, of course), or I would visit their home and we would hang out face-to-face. During those neighbor visits, I learned about brewed coffee (since we never had it at home), the feeling of living in a big family, and a sense of community. And when I am the host, it’s when I learned about how to take care of your visitors and what are the things you could offer them without being stingy or overwhelming.
I grew up in a place where internet interactions only became commonplace in 2009, and not everyone had access to the internet in their homes because a computer and an internet connection could be too expensive for a low-income household.
Even when you have a computer at home, you would still prefer to go to computer shops with your friends and have a face-to-face shared experience playing your favorite game, mainly because mobile internet wasn’t as advanced or as affordable as it is now.
And if you want to spend time chatting with your friend remotely, the best option is to have a one-on-one mobile call, which you can do for hours on end or at least until your prepaid card load expires. I recall our elderly neighbor, who spent her late afternoons on mobile phone calls to stay socialized without leaving home.
The shift happened gradually then all at once.
What took us a trip to the computer shop to talk to our families away from home and being mindful about the hours (because you get billed hourly) now happens effortlessly through a smartphone. But somewhere in that convenience, something fundamental about how we connect has changed.
Now, in my 30s, I was surprised by how the youth “hang out and chill” online, much like in a work meeting, but without an agenda. They listen to and talk with one another on audio while doing their chores, crafts, or whatever. It reminds me of the parallel Zoom calls people made during the pandemic, where they attended two online meetings simultaneously while working on a report.
I find it hard to wrap my head around how one could make the most of her time doing one thing while being distracted by another. While online discourse gives you the feeling of connection, I sense a detachment in the absence of physical cues that typically accompany face-to-face interactions. And if it becomes a casual and routine hang out and chill online, I don’t think I could do it in my youth because we couldn’t be talking on the phone for hours at home under the watchful eyes of my parents. Even before, I had too much voice inside my head screaming that I couldn’t take listening to many more voices for hours on end from the solitude of my home.
But I have to admit that in my youth, in face-to-face gatherings, I would feel fine joining in circles where people talk about anything and everything, laughing about something forgettable and trivial, taking it all in. I was a listener and occasional contributor to the discourse. And maybe, if the technology was available in my time, plus our parents would be more forgiving about how we spend our time online, then probably I would just be like the youth today, hanging out with friends online.
It’s cheaper and more convenient.
And perhaps that’s exactly what they will tell their children someday, about how they used to hang out for hours in virtual rooms, voices floating through screens, multitasking their way through online conversations. Maybe they will wonder, like I do now, whether something was beautiful was lost in all the efficiency.
And I guess, a few years from now, like me, they might crave spending their evenings in solitude because their brains can’t take too much of the distracted attention, taking on so many things all at once.
jessa 