There’s a scene in the movie Going the Distance where the main character’s friend breaks the main character’s cell phone because he’s spending too much time texting his long-distance girlfriend.
If you haven’t seen it, Going the Distance is a romantic comedy (romcom, if that’s how you roll) with Drew Barrymore and her real-life on-and-off boyfriend Justin Long (it’s a good possibility a lot of you hadn’t seen it before Monday, but now you have).
No spoiler alert, but basically they meet in New York City where Barrymore’s character is on a summer internship at a newspaper (she’s in journalism school at Stanford) and where Long’s character lives and works (he works at a record label). They start a long-distance relationship after Barrymore goes back to California, and you don’t need to know anymore than that if you haven’t seen it.
What the movie does as much as anything else is show how people really communicate these days. (Not so much the crude jokes and language, which is fairly realistic for people in the characters’ demographic, but the means through which they communicate.)
Not one time during the movie do you see the couple writing each other letters. Why? Because it doesn’t happen anymore. What you do see (a lot) is them texting. They also talk a lot over the phone, but the main way they stay connected is through texting. In fact, they pretty much stay connected all day every day that way.
We don’t know where these changes in how we communicate are going and what long-term effects they’ll have on human interaction, but the fact is…it’s going technology’s way. Internet and telephony are how it’s done. And the fact that a couple like the one in the movie ever even considers a relationship between New York and California speaks to our investment in it.
By the way, the reason Long’s character gets his phone trashed is because of his cellfish behavior—he’s always texting his girlfriend when he’s hanging out with his friends. You probably know someone like that. (Spoiler alert!) They’re at a driving range, and his friend (SNL’s Jason Sudeikis) grabs his phone, puts it down on the turf and hits it out into space. Maybe that’s something you’ve wanted to do once or twice.
