Love: what is it in today’s world?

Love. They say that love is everywhere--may it be romantic, filial, or family love. Your tropa going to see a movie in the cinema, your whole family going outside to eat in the weekly family day, or a couple you see in the park holding hands, that you can say is love. But love has never been static; it always evolves as the lifestyle of people also changes. It gradually flowers in a different form as time unfolds. How was it different from several years ago? What is it that makes love so different now?

Well you can say that technology has brought a big change on love. Imagine the scenes in the movie where a man in the older century sends out a mail to his far-away lover. His lover then receives it from the mailbox after a week or so. That is not a common scene in our lives today. Being here in the Philippines, the texting capital of the world, you can communicate to your loved ones just one text away. “How are you?”, “Have you eaten already?”. or a simple “Good night” would be sent just seconds away to him/her from any point in the country in this case. Such trivial thing to say, only covering few characters, is entirely possible. A cell phone plus a SIM card and--TADA!-- you are part of a bigger community. No wonder there is one point in your life or more that you receive a random message saying roughly “pwde pOh banG texmeyt?” from a texter who might be very desperate to meet his love of his life.

This wide range of communication can still be extended in a global scale, thanks to the internet. Different kinds of social networking sites have bloomed out like--to name some of the few--FaceBook, and Twitter (though some have wilted, e.g. Friendster which became more like a gaming site now).

Let’s say you don’t access your Facebook account for a week. You miss updates of your group of friends about the gala this Friday. You are now anxious that maybe you will go to Trinoma but the plan is already cancelled. How about talking to your crush? (Maybe stalking) You missed your chance again to see him/her be online again. Friends. Is your 500+ “friends” actually your friends? It is very hard to consider if she is your friend. But, you saw you had a lot of mutual friends with her so you accepted her friend request. Now, do you know who are your friends? Intertwined is the cyber world to the real world, it gets more confusing.

What if you have your love of your life in a distant place, like in the opposite side of the world? If Facebook cannot suffice, there is Skype. Only take note of the time zone and you can freely video chat with your loved ones once in a while. You can connect to them and see them from one point to any point in the world.

Imagine today where people are “falling in love” in the Web, and it is in fact happening. There are relationships that stretches long distances, countries away. Their way of keeping their relationship intact? Internet. Actually, a friend of mine is now in a relationship with an American guy whom she never met physically. They knew each other in Facebook with some friend of friend and now, they are closely connected to each other. Now that is something.

Distances between each of us is becoming small since cellular phones and Internet has become available to us. Imagine this spherical (actually oblate spheroid) world meets at an “imaginary plane” which the present technology has created. All of us can interact there. Love, in today’s context, is more than “everywhere”.

However, the snail mail is still not-so-obsolete even in the presence of the computers, right? Personal letters are still very valuable to us. You can easily delete the history of your conversation in Facebook, but you cannot easily trash hand-written letters. Still, there are things that our technology cannot better. In fact, technology is just a way for us to be with our loved ones; to keep connected, to stay connected. :)

[Dominic Awa]