Contact. What does it mean, anyway? It’s a sports term, a way to fix vision, and a totally foreign concept to most Americans. With phones, computers, and video games, one wonders whether direct human contact will eventually disappear completely. To quote the near-prophetic line from “The Emperor’s New Groove”: “No touchey!”

This declining trend in face-to-face interaction could be excused in the name of efficiency: after all, how much easier is it to iChat with someone rather than making the additional effort to walk/drive/fly to where they are? This stuff just makes sense. Unfortunately, our generation may not realize how much we’re losing in translation.

I’ve always been a little prone to dry humor, which is hard enough to convey successfully in person. Try sticking a witty/sarcastic comment in an AIM conversation, and chances are you’ll end up typing a paragraph of explanation. Emotion all but disappears in print – no matter how you underline, italicize, or tack on smiley faces, you can’t make feelings from colons and parentheses. I lose significant emphasis by transferring these words from my brain to this article because you can’t hear all of the inflection in my voice or see my facial expressions. Feel free to come talk to me sometime — I’m much more interesting in person.

As if AIM wasn’t enough, we need portable print media. Who really uses unlimited text messages, anyway? I’ve been fine on my 250-a-month plan for a long time now, and the main reason I got it was because I was tired of paying for received messages. I often wonder who first thought that texting was a helpful invention. It takes twice as long to type out a response as it does to verbally respond (for most of us, anyways). The primary benefit of text messaging is the flexibility; instead of devoting yourself to one person for a period of time, you can choose when to pay your attention where. If you’d rather focus on something else, you can decide not to acknowledge the message until hours after you’ve received it. Convenient, huh?

Our generation is notorious for our short attention spans — the fact that you’ve made it through 350 words of this article means you’re better at focusing than most. Congratulations. We’re better at multitasking than our parents’ generation, but in general, our ADHD has had a negative — almost crippling — effect. I’m physically incapable of cleaning my room without having music playing. Ask my roommate.

It seems that as a college student, I don’t think I have time to focus on one thing by itself. This is supposed to be the best/most constructive/most crucial time of our lives, right? We can take our time when we’re old. There are too many things to see, people to meet, and options to try for us to zone in on individual things and sleep every once in a while. No wonder so few people feel like they have “deep relationships” anymore. No one has time to develop them.

Is there any way to avoid this? That’s probably up to the individual. Take an assessment of what you spend your time on, and how much of that time you spend with a single focus. Maybe if we all just got homework done without constantly distracting ourselves with Facebook, we’d have time to develop real relationships with our Facebook friends.

How touching.