Symbolic Interaction

Last night a friend called via cell phone from Michigan between sets at a concert.
Cell phones suck. The microphones pick up a lot of background noise, there are frequently echos on one side or the other, there are subtle time delays that make it hard to tell when someone has stopped speaking, and the mics are so low quality that it’s hard to hear the specific words. I end up interpolating and guessing a lot of the time.
Add to this the fact that household wireless phones also suck, for most of the same reasons, and the end result is that you’re not getting much human connection via electrons. Immediately I better understood Debord’s idea that ” the spectacle made relations among people seem like relations among images.”
We had a nice symbolic interaction, but not much human connection that wasn’t manufactured in my own mind. Gawd, give me some eye contact, some body language, some tone of voice and inflection, some sixth-sensory telepathy—otherwise let’s just keep it short and symbolic and not attempt any meaning.