Destruction of our "Social Network"

I've sat back and thought about this for a few days. Mostly because it wasn't a complete thought yet. I'm going to back off the Political for a moment and go with a "Bex Theory" this time around.

I was talking with my son the other day and he began to tell me about a show he had watched. On the show they were talking about advances in technology that would enable a chip to be placed in the eye so that you could watch video without a player. I was immediately reminded of one of my favorite stories, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. It always disturbed me because people essentially stop having social interaction with each other, instead they insert these "seashells" into their ears and listen in on everything and interact without the bother of actually interacting with each other.

I told my son that I was sorry for his generation because they truly are a generation lost. No original thinking, every idea for these kids comes from Wikipedia and Status Shuffle. Their lives are lived one keystroke at a time, they create farms, cities, adventures all on a web page rather than in the real world. It's easier for them to hold a conversation on chat or texting than it is to speak in an interview. We have hobbled our children intellectually.

Think about it. I believe that our generation is partly to blame for this social stunting. Now I'm not saying it's true for all of us but it is because a majority of our generation has itself been disenfranchised by our ideas of how relationships were supposed to work. We grew up in, honestly the first generation of divorces and single parents. Our generation saw the destruction of the nuclear family. We witnessed the animosity of our care givers and the disappointment of our grandparents, older family members that didn't agree with this throw away approach to marriage. If we were truly unlucky, we got to see our parents stay together for the kids. We witnessed real hatred on a daily basis and this was what stuck with us in our formative years as young adults. Now again I'm not saying that this theory is the truth for all but it is for the majority. Some of us have fallen in love and made a commitment to make it work. But how many of us have failed at marriages and/or long term commitment? How many of us have "stayed together" for the kids??

Subconsciously, we have become what was impressed on our minds. And this the platform that Social Networking is built upon. A platform of emotional immaturity and insecurity. As teenagers we use to spend hours on the phone, pacing only as far as the cord would let us or we walked over to our friends house and from there walked to another friends house. We called around till we found who we were looking for and by word of mouth a party had begun. That was our Social Network. But technology will advance and take over our worlds in the name of improvement to our lifestyles. Now we don't see each other, we don't call, we don't show up to invites sent on a website because there is no guilt of seeing that person tomorrow at school/work to hinder us. We text, chat, IM. We don't socialize anymore, we type. My boyfriend in high school use to send me letters every week, do you remember the last time you received a letter because I don't. We stopped interacting with each other socially, we took away the person to person and replaced it with a fake cyber life so as to not constitute the reality of actual emotion for fear of failing at an actual relationship of some kind such as friendships or lovers. Honestly and be honest, how many "friends" do you actually know on your friends lists, how many have you met or had a meaningful conversation with person to person? I'm betting less than half.

We are a generation of hit and run personal relationships. We don't have lasting friendships, we have people we type to.

I'm no better and chances are that even though this is my theory, I will not pick up my cell phone any more than I do now, I won't answer you back except for in a text and I will not see an improvement in any of my pseudo-personal relationships. I will however, remain as disconnected as you who are reading this instead of having conversations with the people in the same room as you.

Till next time Faithful Readers,
BEX