By Rawan AbuShaban.
From the time you wake up until you go to sleep, it’s entirely plausible for you to communicate with the same single person over text, WhatsApp, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram – all in one day. Maybe more.
But is the ability to constantly and simultaneously engage in online communication fulfilling our desire and need to be sociable?
What is it that we are waking up to, if not a parody of a social life?
Keeping in touch has become fun and fast, and a celebrated social norm. However, getting stuck in an online social network, a tremendously intricate and powerful web comprised of social media, results in very real setbacks to users.
We are at a point in time where technology has penetrated most facets of life. We’ve allowed it to do so, and for good cause. We need, therefore we create. We love to invent, and what we invent. I, for example, love baby incubators, wireless Internet, and microwave ovens. To me, these are necessities that fill gaps where needs were previously unaddressed.
Unfortunately, we have welcomed the technological invasion as far as to meet needs that we’ve already met. In other words, we sometime use technology in the attempt to fix things that aren’t broken.
Paradoxically, we are inventing needs by breaking what was previously unbroken: the function and design of human relationships.
Our social lives have been replaced by online followers. Face-to-face interactions with each other have been replaced by 10-second selfies. It’s all fun and fancy free, but not for those who choose to opt out of the online network – and definitely not for the many more who cannot sustain basic relationships with others in the unadulterated and candid context of the “outernet” (i.e. the real world).
Conscious and deliberate social media withdrawal is often met with some variation of the same response: You’re not on Facebook? You must be antisocial. You don’t have a Twitter account? You must not know how to use it. The accusations go on.
On the contrary, this parody of an ideal social life doesn’t begin to address the needs we have with regard to human interaction.
In addition to becoming fun and fast, our correspondence has become overwhelmingly facetious and short-lived, churning “relationships” that are devoid of merit. Even our spoken language appears to be slowly devolving into “chat-speak,” and we commonly find ourselves using acronyms and abbreviations that refer to the online culture we immerse ourselves in, even in offline environments. That is the extent of the technological invasion.
We base our self-worth more on how many aggregate “likes” we get on social media rather than our accomplishments in the physical world. It’s in our pockets, it’s in our minds. That is the extent of the technological invasion. And we welcome it.
However, none of it truly reflects who we are or what is actually real. From sharing Internet memes and cat GIFs, to sending congratulatory messages on everybody’s birthday (regardless of whether you know them), to spreading mass updates about our lives and scrolling down a two-dimensional newsfeed to see how much we can learn and retain about each other from a measly 144 characters. In this situation, one’s only collision with reality will be accidentally walking into a pole.
Even the photos we post to our social networks are literally filtered to mask reality. None of it is real.
Technology should be designed to fulfill our true, human needs, not to replace them with fabricated ones.
That’s not so say that technology isn’t great – it is, and social media is fantastic and full of potential benefit. But these privileges originated as means to an end. We don’t want to replace or degrade relationships, we want to foster them. Real people, real relationships, real interactions; these should be the founding elements of what we consider to be friendship in a human society.
Despite the worldwide appeal, we are becoming dependent on online networks that cannot give us what we need in return. Establishing unhealthy social habits that affect the images we construct for ourselves and others while losing ourselves in the intricate web of social media is a hefty price to pay for so little value in the return.
Ultimately, there is no invention that can replace the power and necessity of face-to-face human interaction.
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Rawan is the principal writer at Bookselves. Follow her on Twitter @obirawankenobi.
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