Recently, I saw the movie Babel again. I experienced a world in which people can’t communicate when I saw Babel. Babel describes a clash of people who live in different worlds. The director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu focuses on a sense of alienation among people in America, Mexico, Morocco, and Japan. Babel has four stories: the story of an American married couple who lose their third baby, Moroccan children who are misunderstood as terrorists, a Japanese father and his daughter who is a deaf-mute, and a Mexican woman who slips across the American border. These people face serious problems. At first, the characters can’t communicate with each other and solve their problems. However, the director shows understanding and forgiveness among people and that all problems and complications can be solved if we just have an open mind regardless of language, race, age, country, and sex. The story of Babel puts many questions to people who live in a complex society. How do we communicate with each other? What makes communication difficult among people?

I thought about communication among ordinary people nowadays after I saw Babel. These days, the tools of the digital and information age are overflowing around the world. Many people use mobile phones that support DMB, WiBro, videoconferencing, and mini homepages and blogs. These things have become the basic needs for communication in the digital and information age. How do people use mobile phones and blogs to communicate in their everyday life? Do you think that these things have any side effects? We write about mobile phones and blogs as new means of communication in “Art & Culture” and “Cover Story.”

Complications due to communication occur not only in movies but also in our real lives. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu suggested understanding and forgiveness as the solution to problems, so we have to think about what we should do to solve communication problems in our lives. Sometimes, blogs and mobile phones make people’s relationships off-line drift apart. However, I think blogs and mobile phones help people to communicate quickly and easily. You can talk to your friends or family as if you had met them directly off-line using a mobile phone that supports videoconferencing. In addition, if you have a blog, you can communicate with your friends any time, even if you stay abroad. These things have some possibility to make communication more comfortable. I hope that Keimyung students think seriously about that.