Our phantom friend

Subject: Our phantom friend.

Television as a medium acts as a filler, it fills the holes in our everyday life in a way that helps us ignore our loneliness, lack of knowledge, unease with silence.  The artificial companionship  formed with the characters in a soap opera, episodes which are anticipated as if they were real, is a well known.
Quiet contemplation seems a thing of the past. Finding solace in ones own company, keeping things simple, understanding the platform on which you as a person stand and not being drawn with envy into the lifestyles of parts of society to which you don't belong.
We witness glitz and outrageous riches are beyond our understanding through the daily bombardment of these lifestyles on television. We become addicted to a style of living most of us will never attain, an image sustained by recurrent 'episodic' injections into a world we will never inherit.
My memories of a simple environment, before television was not one of a painful abstraction, very much the opposite. Our lives were grounded in the reality of who we were. 
Simple games and simple pleasures brought genuine laughter. The interaction between people was also genuine, not the artificiality of Facebook or the tautology within manufactured friendships, which are a feature of online activity. The very "dailiness"and the intensity of our search for commentary on events outside our own sphere of influence, removes us mentally into a nether world where intimacy is traded for multiple skirmishes.  Is it any wonder, in the world of the phantom "friend", that we whirl around like dervishes.

 Facebook and the almost constant search for online messages, the never ending glance  at the mobile phone, willing a contact to share their own fragile need for contact. 

The constant texting of our thoughts and actions. The almost messianic urgency in the passenger when the tube train emerges from the underground, to text where you are. It's as though we have lost that beautiful 'quietus' which past generations had. Where contemplation was an asset and the noise of the world around a distraction.
In reality we are often best alone since the complexity of defending who we are is just too demanding. There are short bursts of time when we feel such affinity for another person that it is a most rewarding thing but in a flash it can be broken and the imaginary mold broken. Most molds are imaginary constructs of how we wish things to be and much of the anticipation of a wider, more enriching experience, outside our own psyche is grounded in this willingness to accept there is such a mold. 

The ultimate connectivity we hope to generate is there, but it comes in fits and starts and dies as quickly as the hope which put it there in the first place. 
How can it be otherwise when the default is so many conflicting aims and desires constantly being undermined by the contrary.