Keeping up

The Internet has changed our world completely. To know that you can so easily have access to current news or past history, that you can consult a dictionary, use a calculator, connect with friends living 4 or 5 thousand miles away… you can’t deny there is a certain magic to all this. Today someone posted a picture of a newborn of Facebook to introduce him to the grandpa’s friends. But are all changes brought by the Internet that good?

Sometimes I have the feeling that everything that needed to be said has already been said. Take Facebook again for example. People post and repost words that don’t belong to them. In certain way, we have all cheap preachers,  teachers, aspiring sages. I’m afraid that popularity has become more important that being truthful, authentic or meaningful. What’s the point in all this sharing of bits of wisdom?

Facebook and the like have become overwhelming for many people I know. I use my personal account on Facebook to read news, mind you!

It is impossible to keep up with all that is being said. These Internet sites, anything “social media,” and not counting time playing games, is consuming most of our free time even though of course you don’t read all your friends post. I see people on waiting rooms, on Starbucks, in the restaurants, and even driving! with their eyes on the iphone. And that’s a problem, because for the sake of socializing online we’re not socialize in real time.

Besides, everything has become public: the grief experienced after a significant loss, the anniversary of your mom’s death, the first time that your child used the potty, what your boss told you this morning, the brand of the toast you ate. But do we really want or need to know that much?

I’m on the alert for anything that ends up alienating us and preventing us from exercising our critical thinking.

I can see how the social can be an instrument for change and it’s great to reconnect with friends from the past that we haven’t seen in ages. But, with a few exceptions of advocacy and protests that have gone viral and generated change, Facebook and other social media give us the illusion of a connection that doesn’t really exist. If we were feeling lonely before this madness exploded, we are even lonelier now. Dependent on a like click.

Just think a little. What’s a friend? Who is a friend?