Max laments cyber society
Nowadays, people hardly speak to one another and some of us, like many of our children, are losing, if they have not already lost, the art of communication.
President Max Richards is seen as a hip Head of State.
Playing mas’ with “Tribe”; spraying abeer at Phagwa celebrations; knocking back cocktails at many a function.
However, like many thinking people he sees the current brave new world of technology as one fraught with danger.
He expressed his misapprehensions when he spoke at a cocktail reception to mark the Queen’s Royal College Old Boys’ Association 75th anniversary at the All Saints Church Hall on Monday night.
Professor Richards said:
“Nowadays, people hardly speak to one another and some of us, like many of our children, are losing, if we have not already lost, the art of communication.
“Why is this ladies and gentlemen? Sadly, it is, in large measure, due to modern technology, that is to say the internet and the mobile telephone.
“Am I against modern technology? Certainly not! But I cannot help but notice that some things which signify progress are in fact eroding the standards and strengths of which we could boast in earlier times.
“Such is the case with language, written and spoken, from the point of view of both content and presentation. There is the language of the internet and of the cellular phone, the latter even permitting predetermined text, which the uninitiated may find very challenging….”
He lamented the tendency by parents to be “more and more permissive of their children’s behaviour in every aspect. Doing whatever they wish, enables them to eschew social interaction, in every aspect.”
According to the President children and youths are hardly “communicating vertically” with interaction confined to their peers.
He noted, however, that one of the things that had survived in schools is the house system which he felt was a means of supporting vertical communication.
He said that this was necessary ”if cohesion among the age groups is to survive.”
Professor Richards who attended QRC in the 1940s praised the Association for “the steadfastness of its members” and pointed out that the school’s “promotion of critical thinking and the passion for excellence, inter alia, persists and the success of the college is manifest in the impact that its alumni have made and continue to make on the nation.”
Hart Edwards, the Association’s president, indicated that it intended to broaden its role and will be reviewing its constitution this year.
At the Interfaith Service, Brother Noble Khan, representing the Muslim faith, called for debates among secondary schools in remembrance of the titantic debates Dr Eric Williams and Dom Basil Matthews held in the Public Library on Aristotle in 1955.
The QRC Old Boys Association was founded in March 23, 1934 by Sir Hugh Wooding, Sir Courtenay Hannays, C. G. Grant, Hamel Wells, Dr F. L. Patrick and Dr. E.H. Farrell.
Eye surgeon/economist Dr Arthur Hutton McShine was the Association’s first president.
Editor’s note: update corrects the typo changing “initiated” to “uninitiated” in the 10th paragaph.