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Postcards, IM-ing, and Connections
Steven W. Gilbert, President, The TLT Group
November 6, 2000
Several years ago
Shelly Steinbach told me something that has improved
my relations with my children ever since.
Sheldon Steinbach, Vice President and General
Counsel of the American Council on Education, and I
were having a "business lunch" to talk about
intellectual property and other important
professional matters of mutual interest. Somehow we
got onto the topic of children leaving home for
college and discovered that Shelly was a couple
years ahead of me – my oldest son Nate had just
begun as a freshman that year. Shelly's daughter
had already been away from home for a couple of
years. We started talking about how difficult it
was to maintain good communication with our
adolescent or young adult children even when they
were home, and even harder when they were away
(especially in those days when email was not yet so
common on many campuses).
Shelly told me his frequent visits to a little store
not too far from Dupont Circle in DC that sold a
wide variety of tourist materials, including an
unusual array of greeting cards and postcards. He
described his practice of sending a card to his
daughter almost every day when she was away from
home. Since then, I've been trying to send
postcards to my children whenever they're away from
home. I'm always looking for interesting postcards
and I always try to carry some postage stamps with
me. I don't come close to Shelly's daily pace, but
probably have averaged about one a week per
son/daughter. When I've visited there living
places, I usually see at least a couple of my
postcards on display somewhere, and sometimes my
sons mention one of the cards messages to me.
You can't write much on a postcard. It's almost
impossible to be very profound or even very
informative. However, when you receive a postcard
with even a brief handwritten message, you're
getting a reminder that someone has been thinking
about you at least a little, that someone cares. So
I keep sending those postcards. Now, I've been
trying to send some occasionally even to other
people in my family who live far away, people I
don't get to see very often any more. It's
something I can do in airports and on airplanes.
More recently, I was watching my 15-year-old
daughter use our home computer to "IM" [Instant
Messaging] with some friends. She usually asks me
not to read over her shoulder. But this time I asked
her if all those overlapping open windows were live
conversations. She was involved with ten separate
online conversations at once. I sneaked a look at
the contents of a couple of the most visible.
At first my prejudices were confirmed about the
shallowness of much of the usage of this medium.
But then my daughter explained that several of those
exchanges were with her friends from summer camp and
with one of her best long-time friends who had moved
away from our immediate neighborhood and who doesn't
go to her school. My daughter was IM-ing to keep in
touch.
The shallowness and brevity of her interactions
weren't really much different from what I write on
my postcards. Both are simple means for allowing us
to stay in touch, even a little, when the pace and
complexity of our lives often prevents us from
engaging in activities that could extend our
personal relationships more significantly.
The value of these activities is in keeping the door
open for more meaningful connections, perhaps even
helping to make the arrangements for them. The
danger is that we sometimes find ourselves with too
many of these shallow connections interfering with
our capacity or opportunity to have more significant
relationships at all – preventing us from having
what Edward Hallowell calls "Human Moments" [see
Hallowell's most recent book, "Connect."]
Those of us engaged in extending the educational
uses of information technology are especially
susceptible to being overloaded with communications
from our colleagues and friends. Many of us have
increasing trouble sorting the shallow from the
deeper or more significant messages. We also feel
obliged to examine and use an ever-expanding variety
of communications media. Our challenge is to find
better ways of managing this rich environment and
these powerful tools, ways that will help us bring
more meaningful "human moments" into our lives.
How can we use our expertise and our time to connect
better with the people who matter to us most?
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