Minglestick madness

This past weekend, about 10 of us from Drake attended a regional leadership conference in St. Louis, Mo. Before attending the conference, we registered online and received several confirmation e-mails. We could have joined the Facebook group, followed the event on Twitter or even gotten text message alerts on our cell phones.

Before we left for the conference, we received numerous messages in our inboxes saying we had to register our “MingleSticks” for the conference. According to the e-mails:

“The MingleStick is a one-click, keychain-sized device providing a major digital upgrade to how networkers exchange contact information and connect on social media. The MingleStick enables all attendees to connect with a single click of a button! And the device is an excellent conversation starter and ice breaker.”

We all breathed a sigh of relief. We were concerned at first that “MingleStick” was a colloquial reference to something else for which we didn’t care to register.

Is that really what our generation has come to, though? Do we honestly “connect with a single click of a button?” And what if I want to become friends with the other attendees and not just mutual “networkers?”

I remember a bonfire I had with some friends last summer. It was an awkward gathering of nine girls and guys who didn’t normally hang out. I counted throughout the night and I remember at one point eight people were texting or playing games on their phone. I had fun watching them.

Our generation is often in one another’s presence, but are we really with each other?

In Survey of Sociology with Linda Evans last semester, our class had to read an essay by Stanley Eitzen entitled, “The Atrophy of Social Life.”

In it, he wrote how more than 8 percent of our society is living alone than lived alone last century. He wrote about the careers we humans have replaced with jobs and the homes we have replaced with houses. I bet if he wrote the essay today he might mention how some friends have been replaced with Facebook friends; maybe some massages have been replaced with “pokes.”

The last decade was nothing short of a revolution in social networking. Before 2000, you may have been jailed if you mentioned how you couldn’t wait to connect with others via your MingleStick.

Your parents may have hid you from the neighbors if you began speaking of some fast 3G service that lets you stalk anyone, anywhere, anytime via a book of faces on something you call “iTouch.”

I love new technology just as much as the next person and I love everything it simplifies. But there is one thing that is best left not simplified: relationships.

Call me primal, but I like being able to see what someone looks like before they go through Photoshop. I might even like smelling their pheromones or actually poking someone to annoy them.

I like connecting with others using my human brain and their human brain, instead of a “keychain-sized device.”

I wish I didn’t have to start up conversations with strangers on the DART bus, but when I do I find I have more to learn from them than I do from my iPod headphones or even my “USA Today” app.

Drake is here to prepare us for the real world, not the virtual one. So let’s take advantage of new technology when it benefits us, but let’s put it down once in a while and actually learn from each other.

And sometime soon I’d be up for some good, old-fashioned mingling.

Price is a first-year rhetoric and politics major and can be contacted at ryan.price@drake.edu.