Squeezing the air out of feelings
Ryan Bingham is the focal point of the new George Clooney film, Up in the Air. Bingham prefers the life of insulation and an arms-length approach to deep relationships. He flies about 320 days out of the year, leaving him 45 days a year to suffer through being in his home city of Omaha.
He makes a living as a traveling consultant who fires people for client companies who are downsizing and don’t want to do it themselves.
As isolating as constant air travel can be, constant Web communication can leave us feeling just as alone. (KEYSTONE/Laurent Gillieron)
So he is not only actively involved in isolating himself; he is in the business of pushing others out the door of their professional homes. He takes this all in stride until he is confronted by an even greater degree of isolation and impersonalization caused by video conference firing through laptops and webcams.
This is the new cost-efficiency system proposed to his firm that can wipe out all those travel expenses incurred by Bingham and his 22 colleagues who do the same job for his consultancy. When he watches Natalie Keener, the 23-year-old Ivy League inventor of the system, fire a distraught 57-year-old employee in Detroit over a webcam, the dehumanization of this new media system hits home and even Natalie herself.
It’s barely a step up from being fired over the phone by an unknown recorded telemarketer.
It doesn’t help that this poor guy has done nothing wrong other than cost the company too much in salary as a longterm employee. To the consultants and their company, he is just another name to check off the list.
But this scene also hits home to anyone who thinks interpersonal communication is somehow better in the computer’s virtual reality than in flesh-and-blood and face-to-face exchanges. Certainly we live in a time when online communication is vital and enhances many areas of our lives. But there are still times when face-to-face interaction just does it better.
Communication is the goal of talking and listening. But it is also the process by which we verbally and nonverbally try to create specific meanings, images, and feelings in the minds and hearts of others.
Effective communication occurs when the message intended equals message received, and when we convey connotations as well as denotations. When you take all that and apply it to online communication – even with webcams – you encounter a problem. That problem is we lose what I would call effective emotional feedback. This is the kind of instant feedback that takes place when you want to respond immediately and appropriately to what someone is expressing emotionally through non-verbal cues.
If you are linked via webcams, you can certainly see some of those non-verbal cues (although things like fidgeting hands or white knuckles would be outside the camera shot), but you are still responding to a camera and not a person.
If you have ever had a Skype conversation with your wife or husband, you know what I mean. Perhaps one of you is on a long business trip; maybe even out of country. It is late at night, and you are both missing each other and realizing you love each other a great deal. Think about how easy it is to express that feeling of love when you are together looking into each other’s eyes vs. looking into your webcam lens.
Real isolation can occur in the Web’s virtual world that, at times, can deliver rock-hard coldness instead of community. (Photo/Jim Willis)
In Up in the Air, effective emotional feedback was needed when the veteran loyal employee had just been told he was no longer needed in the company; that he was losing his job. But the young executive Natalie could not express an effective kind of feedback because she was firing him over a webcam from another location.
He was crying softly into a camera in his office; she was frozen in an emotional prison in hers. It was a sad moment for both individuals. One needed the feedback; the other wanted to give it but was prevented because of the isolating technology used to communicate.
As hardened as Ryan Bingham was to this business of firing others, even he realized that what he was observing here was too much; too detached and too cruel.
This particular scenario is part of what psychologist Kenneth J. Gergen calls postmodern consciousness, or the syndrome of Americans who are so bombarded by media-created images, personalities, and relationships, that they have trouble hanging onto their own personal identities and recognizing the authenticity of traditional reason and emotion.
Gergen believes the driving force behind all this is technology that showers us with vicarious social relationships as opposed to real ones.
If we use computers and the Web to exchange content, to stay in touch, and to expedite the handling of a myriad of business practices, these are effective applications. But if we wind up using ths kind of detached communication to exchange feelings and to comfort, encourage, or inspire each other, we are probably asking too much of the new media and its reality which — after all — is virtual.
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Comments
I couldn’t help but feel so bad for Ryan the entire time I was watching this film. It seems that the story and the relationships portrayed in this story are sadly what America is truning into. There are very few individuals who are depicted in media today that are living the “American Dream” Instead movies are showing the darker side of isolation, social media and broken families. The initmate and personal communication between human beings is taken away in this film when the new type of firing is launched. You can’t help but feel hurt and pain for the people who are being laid off. Especially in the scene when they are trying out the new device and the man who is being fired is just in the next room! How in-personal is that? A sense of intimacy is completely shattered in this film and in todays society. People adn relationship are now relying on social media and video chatting to maintain and even establish relationships.
Technology was supposed to help us, not hurt us. I think that technology has been taken too far to the point where it gives people a false sense of reality and it impairs them socially. Many young people can’t even have a face to face conversation without one another. Technology has given us false identities and perceptions of everything including people, places, information, etc. Just as good writing is becoming a thing of the past, I believe that socializing is right behind it.
I felt a pretty strong emotional response to this movie when I saw it in the theaters. The two girls I went with both expressed how they thought it was depressing, yet I couldn’t help but instantly think of how much I loved the message of the film. The theme of the importance human relationships is just so incredibly strong that it is really intense. I thought it was interesting how they used this theme on two different levels: that of Ryan’s personal life, and that of his work. Interestingly enough, he understands the importance of that human connection when it comes to his job and firing people, however, he completely disregards relationships in his personal life. In the end, we see that Ryan comes to understand the importance of these human relationships in both sectors of his life. Unfortunately, the decisions he has made to keep himself isolated and distant from everyone who cares about him ends up keeping him alone in the end, even though he now actually desires those kinds of relationships. His coworker Natalie comes to understand the importance of that human contact in the working environment and in particular with what they do for a living. Overall, it is interesting to see the comparisons and the contrast between the short-term working related human connection and the long-term lasting relationships with people and how in the end they really are both necessary for every person to experience.
Everyone thinks the media is keeping the world knitted together. I don’t always agree. Of course I am grateful for Skype because I have a sister in Spain, a fiance in Boston and an old roommate in Croatia. I think though that sometimes we forget to to have face to face interactions with the people we are near. Instead of walking to their apartment we merely text or instead of spending valuable time to cook dinner with a friend we call for take out to fit into our busy schedules. People such as Natalie have grown up thinking these are relationships, that webcams and text messages are acceptable ways to communicate. I think it is worth spending less money monthly on a fancy phone to save money and visit a far away friend. Everything has more meaning face to face, and ignoring that is cheating yourself out of solid meaningful relationships.
Dr. Willis, the points you perceived are very well appraised in my opinion, especially in modern times. The art of conversation has been lost in some sense, due to the scapegoat of interaction through media and technology. Unfortunately, there is a distinct separation between age generations forming due to the media hype. I have seen it with my grandparents, and the struggle they have communicating with younger generations and the frustrations from having to cope with society’s expectations of the use of technology. Often, society assumes everyone to be technical “savvy”, and in this they remain ignorant to the older generation, such as my grandparents or even great-grandparetns. In conclusion, I believe technology is creating the extinction of the art of communication, as well as driving a wedge between the older generation to the younger.
Enjoyed your thought-provoking post, Jim.