I don’t like talking on the phone. I can’t remember the last time I called anyone just to talk. I guess I did 60+ years ago when I was in high school, but by the time I was in college, I think I had pretty much weaned myself from long phone calls.

Not that I mind if I see a call coming in from someone I know. But I do hope they are calling for a reason, not just to chat. And when I get a phone call from a number I do not recognize, I don’t answer the call. If the caller leaves a voice mail, I will start to listen, recognizing that most of those callers want to buy a house in my neighborhood, or are concerned about the diabetes that I don’t have.

But I do like to communicate. And for that reason, email to me was a godsend. And for years, I communicated by email a lot. But then it began to taper off. Not because I slowed down, but because so many people (especially, but not only, younger people) stopped looking at their emails very often, or because their email inboxes were so filled with notes from people who wanted to buy a house in their neighborhood or treat their diabetes that they just gave up looking.

Many of those people started to text. I receive texts from family members (and from people who want to buy houses in my neighborhood or treat my non-existent diabetes), but not very often from ordinary folks. And I hardly ever have conversations by text.

I do have What’s App on my phone, but I never use it. I did for a while last year when some Israeli friends were coming to visit and that’s the way they communicated. But that was only until they went back home.

The result of this is that I have less one-to-one communication with people. And I miss that.

But the smart phone has found a way to partially compensate for that. Now there are ways to communicate not one-to-one, but by reaching many people at once. You can do this through Facebook, and I do. But now there, as well, people are shying away. While I still have hundreds of Facebook “friends”, fewer of them look at Facebook and fewer still respond to posts. And as to other similar apps, I have never really used them very much. Instagram is for some reason confusing to me, and Twitter is just too filled with both garbage and redundancy. And most of others, I have either never heard of, or I would be talking to the wind, because no one I know uses them.

And finally, there is TikTok. I am not a TikTok. I am not a TikTok creator, but I do look at TikTok a lot – I guess mainly for fun. I have a couple of entry points and I have trained them pretty well – one for political posts, one mainly for music. And the fact that China owns the app doesn’t interest me very much.

But unfortunately I do see problems with TikTok. It seems clearly addictive, and while this addiction may be fine for an 80 year old retired man, it is not ok for a 14, or 21, year old. And for them, it is not only its addictive qualities, but its content. So much of TikTok seems to show “perfect” young folks doing acrobatics, performing extraordinary athletic events, talking about sexual exploits, bantering with their significant others, or ways they earned large amounts of money. The connection between TikTok addiction and mental illness seems to be more than a question.

No answers to these questions – but when you add these concerns to those surrounding Artificial Intelligence I wrote about yesterday, you realize that we are all on a one way trail to ……………. where?