The Facebook Epidemic

I remember as a kid there were only three ways of keeping in touch with friends and family: through postage mail, by calling, or by visiting that person. All these methods took some kind of real effort, too. To write a letter, for example, you had to sit down and write it, put it in an envelope, give it a destination to go to, and throw a stamp on it. On top of all that, you had to give the letter to the post office so your friend can actually receive it, in about two weeks. Written “snail mail” was probably the most cumbersome way of keeping correspondence. But once the letter reached your friend, having been hand written, it had your presence imprinted into it. The receiver knew that that piece of paper was in your hands shortly before it came into hers.

Enter, the digital age: we don’t have time to put our hearts into communication. The demise of snail mail came with the invention of email. Snail mail’s too slow. Now you can create a message in five minutes, throw in a shorthand message, and send it to however many people you want–for free. Why would you want to spend 40 minutes doing the same thing, and then pay a postage carrier to send it?

In the digital age, calling is becoming obsolete, too. Who needs to call when you can text? Calling can be nerve wrecking; texting is much less invasive. You don’t have to keep focused on the conversation with texting, either. When calling someone, you’re pretty much devoting your time to that person.

How is that a bad thing? It’s not if you were accustomed to the pretexting days and can still call the people you truly care about, instead of relying solely on texting. But if you’re a generation Y kid and texting is all you know, then you’re not going to revert to calling except in rare circumstances. This will result in poor social skills among our children, and even worse social skills among our children’s children. Our focus is being destroyed because we're spending every waking hour on digital devices.

Then there are the social networks, like Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is a website where you can create a profile for yourself and keep in touch with all your friends. But how many people really have a thousand friends? The biggest problem with Facebook is it allows you to share all the intricate details of your life (probably too many details), while keeping you at a safe distance from the rest of the world. After all, who in their right minds would sit in a room full of people and shout out about the toenail fungus that just won’t go away? After reading somebody’s profile on Facebook, there really isn’t anything left to talk to that person about, except maybe about reading that person’s profile on Facebook.

Twitter is just an excuse to constantly talk about yourself. Again, after you read a person’s Twitter, you’re extremely limited on your conversation topics when you actually see your friend in person. Unfortunately, this removes the necessity of people interacting face-to-face. We’ll soon see people sitting in a room together, talking via text messages on their phones­–­­not because the unlimited data plan has them excited, but because they are uncomfortable with human exposure and all they know is T9.