“Social Media Scare Mongers”
(unpublished article from 2010)
Another week, another idiotic article about how social media is allegedly pulling people further apart. Well, let me sound the bell now and say that this is the most absurd thing I have ever heard. I don’t know if they think it makes for good copy or they are genuinely alarmed, but these pundits are constantly trying to portray us all as slaves to technology; it never seems to occur to them that the technology exists because people overwhelmingly want it.
As a teenager during the 80s, I seem to remember a great deal of grumbling and hand wringing over how much time kids were spending on the phone. Episodes of certain treasured sitcoms focused on the plight. It was a very modern crisis. Nowadays texting is the common boogeyman, as it purportedly “ruins” a person’s ability to spell properly or grammaticize correctly, what with its abbreviations and acronyms and all. Right. If you really cared enough to research it, I guarantee the same hysteria was waged toward telegrams in the 1800s:
NEW FANGLED DEVICES MAKING US ROBOTS STOP HELP STOP PLEASE VISIT HORSEBACK STOP BRING BBQ STOP
or whatever. And in between the phone pandemic and texting armageddon, of course, we had the whole email scourge, which “destroyed” traditional letter writing.
Call me a nut, but I’m up for written expression in virtually any form. All vilified in their time, who would dare say now that rap, punk, and pop lyrics don’t serve a valid societal purpose, or for that matter, graffiti? In an age where we’re all supposedly becoming more illiterate, magazine sales are higher than they were ten years ago and the average book size is at its all time largest. Texting has allowed me to break out obscure words like subterfuge that would either never come up or would pass without notice when spoken, obscure words that I then have to explain. And if email to some extent supplanted letter writing, well, so what – it’s easier to write, send, and store, it’s cheaper, and there’s no conclusive proof it has made anyone into a grammatical nimrod. On the contrary, I would argue that at the very least a great deal of workplace conversations have been replaced by email, and that these are very thoughtfully and professionally composed, thus improving my letter writing skills.
All of which brings us to Facebook. This doomsday nonsense that it and its kind – Twitter, MySpace, Linked In, and so forth – are alienating people somehow. I read one laughable article just the other day that stipulated we don’t know how to make real friends anymore because we have hundreds of virtual ones. But let’s take my own experience, which I feel is a fairly average one. Right now I have 181 Facebook friends, again somewhere around the statistical norm. Of these are a bunch of close friends, a few minor ones, some people I haven’t seen since high school, my girlfriend, a whole slew of family members, a few women from my past whom I’m still on speaking terms with, and two people whom I seriously do not know.
Such a wide array of people from such diverse backgrounds, and I’m always amazed at how everyone by and large knows how to conduct him or herself. We are much more sophisticated than we think (which should further consign the notion that we are “controlled” by technology to the dustbin). You have few worries that someone is going to post inappropriate pictures or say something he shouldn’t. There are messages you can send in private, and those that are public, and everyone seems to grasp without saying so or asking what belongs where. It provides a forum for harmless clowning over a video or a comment, and check out what’s going on in people’s lives if you care to.
Meanwhile, it isn’t as though my relatives in Ohio that I have always seen about twice a year, that I suddenly started saying, “oh well, I have them on Facebook, so I don’t actually need to visit them now,” which is the picture naysayers are continually trying to paint. On the contrary, we catch up with one another just as often and when we do, there’s much more to talk about because we’re brushed up better than we were in years past. Kids from my graduating class were added because they were kids from my graduating class, with the expectation that this is what they always would remain – kids from my graduating class. They are neither any more nor any less interesting to me than they otherwise would have been. You could make the case, well, why bother, except wouldn’t that attitude be the antisocial one? Certainly adding them on Facebook is not.
Bottom line is that social appliances either catch on like wildfire or they die, based on their degree of usefulness in our lives. You get what you want out of it, which may be nothing at all. I like the delayed response texting allows, when I am not always available by telephone. As stated earlier, I like being able to dash off an email in lieu of speaking with someone at the office, if only for the documentation that a certain conversation transpired. And yes, what I get out of Facebook is a place to post pictures, state my travel itineraries, and occasionally jot down a comical observation or two. If there are a couple of well meaning but somewhat annoying folks whose relentless posts about every eyebrow twitch led me to permanently “hide” them, so be it. I see no difference between that and the routine social maneuvers we humans have been performing for centuries.
Instead of all this endless bellyaching about what a menace social media is upon our lives, maybe everyone’s time would be more efficiently spent analyzing why these phenomena caught on, and what this says about us – that we are a sophisticated people who have found better, newer models of communicating.