Let's get physical

Over the weekend two of the girls who I went to school with and who I am still close friends with, turned thirty. They held a birthday extravaganza in London, complete with numerous cocktails and dancing until the night turned into morning. Sadly, due to my current state of poverty, I spent the weekend in Dublin. I did receive a number of texts from them, telling me that they were having a great time but that I was missed. It might seem ridiculous, but these few lines of text-speak made all the difference to my mood.

These days we're constantly connected and it means that we never have to miss a thing, in terms of world news or updates from our friends or connections. It's a world in which you can tell someone half way around the globe that you were thinking of them - milliseconds ago - and in which you can send pictures, music and multi-layered experiences in invisible, instant messages.

Recently, I watched a television documentary about Internet addiction. Although I'm quite the fan of the world wide web, I think that I've got my usage under control, however, I am very worried that I will soon have to take my boyfriend to see a psychologist to treat his addiction to all things digital. I'm sure that there are millions out there like him!

Modern communications (is texting still considered modern? We've been texting for a decade, surely by now it's practically old hat!) link us to one and other in networks that previously we were too busy and too lazy to maintain. With the click of a mouse or tap of a dexterous thumb we can send words and love to the next continent, or to the boy next door. This is wonderful and even now, when a lesser invention might have turned stale, the potential of the connected world has the power to take my breath away.

However, we shouldn't exist on a diet of digital alone. Physical contact is the first language that we learn and throughout our lives our senses remain the primary means by which we absorb information about the world around us. I recently read an article in The New York Times, which quoted Matthew Herstein, a psychologist, who had undertaken a study to research our ability to communicate through touch. His study found that through touch alone participants could communicate 8 distinct emotions, with about 70% accuracy. The same article quoted James A Coan, also a psychologist, who suggested that we build relationships to distribute problem solving across our brains and that we communicate signals of support through touch.

However, an article at CNN.com warns of the perils of inappropriate touching. The article is focused on the work environment, but could be applied to other situations. The author notes that people have differing tolerance levels for physical contact and that we should be careful when touching others, even when we believe our touching to be appropriate - put simply, one man's supportive pat on the back, is another man's bullying smack between the shoulder blades.

It's a minefield out there until you establish what's what with the next person's personal space. One thing is for certain, wherever we get it from, to remain sane we need the odd slight of hand, pressure of arm and warm embrace. In The Age I read an article about two people who craved the tiniest physical contacts. One woman who lived alone shopped daily in order to experience the slight physical contact that this entailed. A man who had lost his wife started to attend mass, not for the spiritual relief but for the tactile element of the experience.

Life online is a fantastic supplement to life off line, but when the online world becomes the real world, the line can sometimes go cold. Much can be communicated through text, type, image and video, but so much more is communicated from one person to the next when they are in close proximity. Sometimes what is communicated when two people meet is that one person is uncomfortable or that the other is nervous, but whether the experience is good or terrible, if we could see the streams of communication emanating across the divide, I am sure that what we would be looking at would be an incredibly complex web of information.

This weekend I was very happy to receive texts from my friends and I am always delighted to read emails from those who are far flung and others who I might see weekly, but who I catch up with in byte size portions throughout each day. Some people are worried that we'll one day get lost in the digital world. I'm not worried. We'll always crave something that the coded environment can't give us and that something is human contact; what goes on in the space between two pairs of eyes and the kind of communication that happens when one person shakes hands with another, or when two people sit with their bodies touching.

Give me Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and Blogger every day, but there's nothing quite like being there. You can't taste the cocktails in a photograph.