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(NaturalNews) Social networking is an illusion. The term is almost self-contradictory, like "jumbo shrimp" or "military intelligence." Networking on the 'net is, by any real measure, anti-social.
I know a young guy who has over twenty thousand friends on Facebook and MySpace. That sounds impressive at first: Twenty thousand friends? Wow. Except there's a problem: None of them are real.
Not in any way that matters, anyway. They aren't real flesh-and-blood people who he's ever chatted with face to face. He doesn't know their real names (only their screen names) and wouldn't even recognize them if he passed them on the street (a real street, not a virtual world street). In effect, this guy who has twenty thousand friends is completely alone in the real world.
He has no real friends, he lives in his parents' basement (how classic is that?) and he rarely leaves his house. He's vitamin D deficient from the lack of sunlight, socially deficient from the lack of face-to-face interactions, and even though he has twenty thousand friends online, he still hasn't managed to find a girlfriend in the real world (inflatable dolls don't count).
Although this guy is alone in the real world, he's not alone in his pattern of virtual social interaction. An alarming number of teens and twenty-somethings follow much the same pattern, and the sheer numbers of people engaged in the seductive pull of online social networking are beginning to define the social interactions of an entire generation.
The more active people are in online social networking, the more isolated they become in the real world.
Online relationships do not replace real social interactionSocial networking interactions are no replacement for real-world bonding between friends. Real-world friends build commonality and trust based on shared personal experiences. Bike rides, hiking trips, shopping experiences, skipping school, dance parties... These mutual histories form true friendships based on common experiences that reinforce shared worldviews, an important foundation for any lasting friendship.
Such experiences are utterly lacking in the online world. Hurling photos, movie links and clever chat quips into the vast void of the public 'net is no replacement for private, shared events witnessed and remembered with your friend at your side.
This is why the internet, while it appears to be connecting us, is actually driving us apart. We are friends online but strangers in the street. We live in boxed houses, year after year, never even knowing the names of those souls who live right next door. We stand in line at the grocery store like automatons, afraid to make eye contact with anyone other than the cashier, for which eye contact is "safe" -- but only at the appropriate moment, after the previous customer has cleared the space and handed it off to you.
The people who physically live closest to us are, in reality, our greatest strangers. We don't know their interests, their favorite bands or recipes, or their intimate secrets. Those details are more readily shared online, usually in an attempt to replicate the feelings of intimacy and bonding where no such bonding is realistically possible. A stranger on the 'net who knows your deepest desires is not necessarily your friend, even if they follow you on Twitter. They might just be some future stalker.
It this age of great digital connectedness, we increasingly find ourselves clinging to illusions of intimacy, adrift in a sea of anonymity, surrounded by the great faceless, nameless masses from which no commonality can be extracted.
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Sunday, May 24, 2009
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