I'm sitting here today listening to Radio 2, listening to a programme about Council Cuts and the possibility of Library closures and the thought occurred to me - would anybody notice if their local library closed down? After all, people can buy second hand books for as little as 50p from their local charity shops so why bother taking out and returning books when they can be bought and kept?
Now, I'm an avid library user - I love spending an hour browsing through the shelves, marvelling at the titles and the author names plus reading the introductions to the stories themselves. I love the fact that I can choose lots of books to take home and all for free. However, something has changed within the library sector of late and that is the horrible rise of the self-service. I can now go in to the library, return my books, take out more books and borrow DVDs without saying anything to a living person.
What has happened to the lovely librarian who used to stamp the books and have a quick chat about the author and advising me on other books that the author has written? They have been replaced by a machine. Apparently this is progress.
At Supermarkets now, the self service check out has become the norm. Yes, there is usually a person somewhere in the vicinity of the checkouts to lend a helping hand but lets face it, it takes a brave person to man these with the amount of frustration that happens at these check outs. I suspect that is why it is normally a woman who is supervising them. Staff seem to get very frustrated when I decide I'd rather queue up and have someone else put my shopping through the checkout and talk to someone rather than risk the awfulness that can only be attributed to these decidedly deadly checkouts with the monotonous electronic voice.
Are we becoming an unsociable nation? Are we losing the interaction skills of ages past? Certainly manners are being lost with more and more people grunting their thanks or expecting people to respond to their requests without the word 'Please.'
How about the electronic gaming devices where people can talk to people all over the world as they play against them? Some people are room bound for days and nights just so they can concentrate on their game play.
This year, more people than ever will give their small children an ipad or a lap top. I wonder if it is because parents have lost the ability to play with their children, to give them time. Last night I watched a programme about people on benefits at Christmas. Their main priority was not to pay the rent or to explore ways of providing healthy meals but to give their children more stuff that they had no room for in the first place, presumably so that these children could be kept quiet and out of the parents way.
It's very sad that we have become a nation of people that no longer want to interact in person with each other. The beginning of a silent world is starting and I for one, would rather live in a world where I can speak to people, have a laugh with people, listen to people rather than experience the dark cloud of non interactional silence.
Perhaps with sharing my thoughts with you, we could start to begin to end the oppression of the silence and explode through the very walls of our own personal boxes of self imposed aloneness because in the words of a very well known advert, "We are worth it".
