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By Evan ~ December 17th, 2007. Filed under: rant, world news.
Now that Creative Writing Monday is dead, I’m forced to spend yet another day each week boring you with my reactions to news stories and personal accounts from my life. I hope you’re all happy. What’s worse is that even my good friends were leaving negative comments. I can’t begin to imagine what the random stragglers were thinking. It’s enough to make me want to give up writing.
Things could be worse. I could be addicted to social networking sites, for example. Ever since the inception of this page, I have rallied against sites like MySpace and Facebook. I’ve written about how these fantastic discoveries that have provided us with the ability to instantaneously communicate with almost anyone on Earth also promote anti-social behavior. They coax people into sitting at home interacting with people who they’ve only met on the Internet instead of going out or talking with real friends. They take up (sometimes) countless hours of our daily lives, subtly eroding our notions of normal human contact. I’ve even gone so far as to say that these sites are enabling a more rapid breakdown of the socialization process. We are isolating ourselves, we are creating facades or avatars to put across idealized definitions of who we are. Our increased reliance on websites like MySpace and Facebook to keep us in constant contact with others has even led to a deficiency in our communicative skills. You don’t have to look far to find articles and studies supporting these theories.
Today the New York Times is running another story about Megan Meier, the thirteen year old girl who committed suicide after falling victim to a hoax perpetrated by a neighborhood mother. I’m sure you’ve heard all about this tragedy in the news, but some of the quotes from the article really struck a chord with me.
“’I’m sure that every girl at this table has used cellphones or instant messaging to say something mean about somebody,’ … ‘Once you’re on MySpace, you’re trapped,’ said Jake Dobson…’You spend all your time online just trying to keep the negative stuff about you from spreading.’
Granted, these quotes are coming from middle and high school students, but similar sentiments can easily be extended to people of any age. Our age bracket might not be so concerned with keeping negative stories from spreading, but that doesn’t make us immune from many of the negative aspects of those sites. We possess the capability to be just as careless with the information about ourselves that we divulge on MySpace or Facebook as young people do, and we are equally susceptible to facing the consequences of publicizing such information.
Our society has always valued rapid technological — especially in the field of telecommunications — advancement, but the increase in depersonalized communication is becoming quite formidable. Far too many people, it seems, are addicted to the joy that comes from immediate social interactions. They do not realize that relying only on digital methods of communication forces their focus away from what should be our primary means of communication, the face-to-face contact.
Or, maybe I’m just becoming an old curmudgeon who doesn’t feel like keeping up with the times.
There you go assholes, once you force me away from sharing journal entries and free-writes you have to deal with this kind of writing. And this kind of writing is so, so much worse.
