I recently took a train from Edinburgh to a town far north in the Scottish Highlands named Portskerra. This is a place where, on a clear day, you can look directly out across the ocean at Orkney Island and catch puffins diving from the clifftops east of Melvich Bay. There is a post office, a village shop, and a bus stop, which is visited by one bus, three times a week. A fish and chip van comes every Wednesday. On a train back to this place, two thoughts concerned me. The first: when we change trains at Inverness, will the next one appear? (locals had already warned me) and my second thought was informed by a nagging sense of duty: a 7-hour train journey would give me plenty of time to tackle the pile-up of messages on my phone and reassure my dad that the storm he had found on his weather app had not reached the Highlands in any kind of alarming capacity. My dad and I won’t text often, but he’ll check the weather in Scotland regularly. It’s his own way of keeping up with me. As many friends of mine embark on Erasmus programmes abroad this September, I can’t help wondering whether it’ll be possible to stay in touch while also making the most of the moment, and without just exchanging tales back and forth. Can connections with loved ones ever be authentically and fully maintained when living many miles apart?
These past few months in the Highlands have taught me a lot. My dad follows the weather, and my mum likes to call me from the car. I exchange voicemails with school friends and receive emails about the pope from my granny. Unfortunately, none of these mediums are sufficient to adequately express the panic/horror of finding oneself front row at an interactive comedy show in which the host talks about necrophilism, and occasionally bursts into singing. Or the agony of being ushered into a tiny, repurposed, tutorial room to sit through a one-hour, one-woman show where you and your 3 friends constitute two-thirds of the audience, and a recording plays overhead of the host experiencing a panic attack. This was my weekend at the Edinburgh Fringe. Relaying such events over Snapchat voice memos is just not the same.
And I don’t think any kind of digital communication can be the same, or can even come close to meeting the value of face-to-face interaction, because this form isn’t just about relaying messages or exchanging life stories; it’s about warmth, and closeness, and feeling connected to another person. It’s about funny facial expressions and breaking into laughter at the same moment, and experiencing the intimacy of this connection while the rest of the world buzzes on in the background behind you. Socialising is rarely ever about someone having something to say; however, when technology becomes the primary medium through which we communicate, one of the main ways we socialise is removed. “Chatting” becomes much less possible through one’s phone. Its purpose is not to exchange information; it’s simply about spending time together, communicating for the sake of connection rather than transmission of information. Though it could be argued that people can still ‘chat’ over the phone, the act itself usually implies that the caller has something they want to say, and it is far harder to judge the yardstick for length of yapping when unable to gauge the listener’s expression.
Replacing in-person interactions with technology also means that you’re not forging any new memories with that person. You’re not doing any new things together; instead, you’re simply exchanging summary snapshots of each other’s lives. Our smartphones mean that we are accessible to others all of the time, and this has also increased the level of maintenance that ordinary friendships require. It’s not irregular to text friends every day, even when there might not be anything new to say. It has just become the norm, the expectation, to know what all of us are up to all of the time. Sometimes I yearn for the summers our parents had – writing letters to one another because that was the only way to know what anyone else was up to, stopping briefly in a phone booth trying to catch hold of someone, if you had the coins. These methods of communication took time, effort and much more purposeful intent than it takes to send a DM to a friend on Instagram. Communication was less often, yes, but it was more meaningful.
We’re not meant to be in contact with all the people in our lives, all of the time. Not only because that’s exhausting but also because when you spend so much of your life talking to others about your life, how much life are you left with to actually live? Plus, there is always the small risk that phoning your parents on a random Thursday at 9 pm will result in being broadcast on loudspeaker to all the guests at their dinner party. (I eventually invoked aeroplane mode and blamed the cut-off on wifi issues). Anyway.
As the train rattles on, I relinquish my story about the one-woman show with reluctance. The carriage underbelly races over each track while fellow passengers snore beside me. A few whispered voice notes to my friends back home will have to do. I suppose this medium will have to continue during Erasmus season, but we’ve agreed to also undertake slower forms of communication – letters, email, carrier pigeon. There’s also a collective understanding that communication will be less frequent, and the only way to counteract the effects of this is through visits! A happy ( though costly) fix.
On a train to the north, there is really nothing I want to do less than reach for my phone. I just want to watch snippets of the world go past and be a complete observer. I love trains for this reason. I get to watch the world through a window without having to offer anything of myself in return. In a way, that’s what I wish I was able to do with loved ones back home – catch snippets of their lives without having to swap it with them for a snippet of my own. Maybe I will write a few postcards. For the time being, though, I just look out the window and catch glances into other people’s lives, in that one frozen instance, and I feel like that is enough, in that moment, to feel connected.
