Making contact and talking to other people is just as important as breathing, Jason Davidson, instructor of speech, said in his speech, “Communication as Breathing” last Friday at Marsee Auditorium.

Before starting his lecture, Davidson led the audience in a breathing exercise.

He followed that with the question, “How much time do people actually spend talking to a real person?”

“We are not making enough contact with people and it’s hurting us emotionally and physically,” Davidson said. “Hundreds of medical studies support the fact that people with few interpersonal relations die before people who enjoy a large network of family and friends.”

Davidson attributes the lack of communication between individuals to the increase in self-serve devices such as self checkouts in grocery stores, cell phones, do- it-yourself kiosks and other automated services because they do not require human-to-human interaction.

“Everyone has a cell phone,” Davidson said. “They started the size of a brick, and now they are the size of a cracker.”

“Every time I get out of class I see people on their cell phones and people listening to their iPods,” Evelyn Castro, freshman, said. “No one talks to each other anymore.”

Besides the lack of communication, Davidson also believes that Americans work too much, only to achieve materialistic goals.

“We work so hard so that we can have a roof over our heads to make sure we have food on the table,” Davidson said. “We spend so much time and energy on our physical needs while totally ignoring the more important ones: the need to be seen, the need to be heard, and the need to be touched.”

Cheers and claps of support to his claim could be heard throughout the auditorium.

“The world thinks that material things are more important and you lose focus on basic needs like talking to one another,” Destiny Perez, freshman, said.

This lack of communicataion is a reason why some people are not happy and content with thier life, according to Davidson.

“Overtime, people have reported that they have less people they say they can talk to,” Davidson said. “We’re over-worked, unhappy and we have fewer and fewer people to share our happiness with.”

In his metaphor of communication as breathing, he describes the process of inhaling as the act of listening and the process of exhaling as the act of sharing one’s information.

“Inhaling means listening without rehearsing what you are going to say next or judging the other person,” Davidson said. “Exhaling is getting something off your chest.”

“Humans are social creatures, so if we never make contact and if we experience mainly impersonal, objective, or distance interactions with other people, we will never develop to our full potential,” Davidson said. “So don’t forget to breath.