Finding real friends
Apparently I find that an important aspect of my existence is my social life. Oh, and by social life, I don’t mean dragging myself to visit my annoying neighbors on a daily basis in order to maintain our ‘neighborly relationship’. I mean my REAL friends from all around the world.
Well, how do you fit a flight to Brazil and back in 24 short hours? And what about spending all that money just to visit a friend for a few hours? NO. Welcome to the year 2012. I can use something that can be extremely helpful and extremely dangerous at the same time. It’s what we human beings like to call ‘social media’. You know, BBM, Facebook, the stuff that keeps you connected.
Make-up or break-up?
What comes to mind when you think deeply is… are they actually helping us maintain our social lives, or are they just breaking us apart from past friends?
On the positive side, when you’re in a situation where you can’t meet your friend in person, you can always contact them easily through a social media channel, and pretty quickly too. You can group chat or even video chat with a bunch of relatives that you haven’t seen in a while. In other words, meet them virtually.
Sounds nice and harmless, right? Well, up to a point. Consider this example. A group of friends are sitting at a table, and instead of communicating face-to-face, they are all tapping away on their BlackBerrys, zoned out and into another world.
Social disconnect
So are these ‘useful tools’ actually bringing humanity downhill? Seems unbelievable, but it’s actually possible.
I find myself attached to these strange things myself, and it feels like only yesterday we had to jam our friends’ numbers onto our landlines to contact them.
I can’t help but notice how quickly the world is evolving. But here’s the question… is it evolving in a good way? That’s something for you to think about.
