It seems that we don’t use names the way we once did. There was a time when using another’s first name implied a certain level of relationship. We’d talk about George Clooney and refer to him as “George Clooney” and not “George.”
Then new media rolled up the beach. The 160 character limits of SMS meant brevity trumped propriety and in walked a new way of relating.
We’re all on a first-name basis now. George Clooney isn’t “George Clooney” because he’s replied to some of my tweets. He’s just “George” now. While the PR types seem pretty happy with the “cocktail party” atmosphere, they have little skin in the more personal side of online interactions.
When everybody is on a first-name basis, a level of intimacy is lost. While you once might have gone from calling me, “Mr. Simonds” to “Seth” as a way of expressing more intimate conversation, your words would be lost on me today. Just like George, everybody calls me Seth these days.
So how does one regain the intimate tone lost to new media? By replacing proper names with pronouns.
“Hi, Seth!” becomes, “Hey you!” (mostly from females)
“Hey Seth!” becomes, “Hey man” (primarily from males)
Isn’t that interesting?
Image: Ride
Hey, you!
Seth,
I went to Italy about five years ago, spent a week learning to eat low-salt food and watch people who seemed thin and always wore stylish brown leather shoes, and when I arrived back in the U.S. I was shocked at how childish most Americans seemed. Baggy pants. Coffee sippy cups. White Jerry Seinfeld sneakers. It took about two days for my mental compass to reset and find our casualness normal.
The trend of Western adolescencification has been continuing for decades. It began with the 1960s youth counterrevolution that made long hair and blue jeans hip, and seems to have accelerated in the 1990s and 2000s with the death of ties and suits in corporate offices. Our top-grossing movies are now cartoons. Our martini and scotch and whiskey drinks in bars have turned into sugar-flavored chocolate martinis. Starbucks (yes!) has turned coffee into whipped-cream hot sundaes. And let’s not forget our news media and politics, which has metastisized from objective news angles and formal discourse to Fox News commentators and Congressional reps shouting like angry children.
I can’t explain these shifts, except perhaps that as our commercialized society matures to the point where we are saturated with three TV sets per household and all the toys we need, we may be regressing to a childlike state of emotion due to overstimulation. But the language shift you note, while interesting, seems only part of the bigger picture.
Childishness may be our root emotional state; the Romans threw world-wrestling parties in the Colosseum to keep the masses entertained, feeding Christians to the lions; our churches have held storytimes for centuries to ease our longings. Maybe the mature formality of the early 20th century was an aberration. Childhood is enjoyable for most people, but it’s kind of a shame to see everyone headed back.