Social Networking

I have 176 friends in Facebook. Well, I had. Mind you, they weren’t just friends; they were relatives, people I usually stalk

(Yes, I am a stalker… Hello, my name is Claudia and I am a stalker….)

Back to subject at hand, people I admire, people I support, a plethora of people from all over the world.

Facebook is a wonderful thing. Social networking had broadened our horizons and has allowed us to reach out and touch people who would have otherwise disappeared from our life. AT&T never had it so good. Even people who you have never spoken to before got a chance to get to know you, on the computer and some people found their support system in the people who came looking at their status and their page on a regular basis.

Even games like Mafia wars and farmsville provide the premises for team work and cooperation from unlikely groups and create a sense of community. My neighbors, my mafia… you know, my people.
As if that wasn’t good enough, social networking allowed us an outlet for expression. We looked for witty quotes, funny sayings or just a chance to simply blurt out whatever was in our minds, others comment on it, it is interaction with others, as defined by the 21st century.

MySpace, Facebook and Twitter are available to you everywhere, and I mean that literally. If you have one of those nifty blackberry phones, you could be on the porcelain throne and update your status, some people have done it…

You see, and that’s when I think facebook becomes something negative.

Being able to reconnect with friends and family is all good. Seeing how people have changed and how their lives turned out is amazing, some people have changed radically, others are still the same as almost twenty years ago. Social networking permits us, again, to make connections that would never have happened.

But what if they weren’t supposed to happen?

There were 170+ friends on my facebook, I spoke to them initially and it was great, new things to discover about old friends and the joy of discovering the old ones gave us a sense of recognition, as part of us acknowledged par t of them. Sometimes it did not even go that far, sometimes it was the first message and the emotion never sparked, there was no excitement in the reconnection, it was only the satisfaction of having found someone else, (now you understand how a stalker feels). Some of them, I didn’t even greet, I just accepted their request and it didn’t make a difference, one way or another.

However, if you were to go back and look at my page, you would realize that it was only the same people, over and over who went back to my page. My circle, my friends. As I constantly kept up with their status, so did they come and look at mine, we commented back and forth and it was just another way of strengthening something that was already there.

With others though, there is no real connection. Not that you would expect it to be, but in an age when computers and smart phones have taken over our communications, it is really easy to delegate our commitment to others to a few text messages. It is really easy to become engrossed in other drama or even become hooked to the interaction in posts or games. We do this, I have done this and I have forgotten something much more important.

The human factor.

As humans, we relish interaction. We need someone to talk to, to talk at us, with us, around us. Aside from talking we need to be touched, it has been proven in countless of studies that human beings need to be touched, a hug, a pat on the back, even a shoulder to cry one. All of these things are intrinsically coded into ourselves and without it, WE know, we know that despite the connection, it is not the same.

Things are lost in facebook; the love someone can convey to another cannot be fully expressed to one another through a post on a social network site. People post things on each others status and the misunderstandings and Drama it creates is enough to give the Hallmark channel enough fodder for the next millennia. And the number of people willing to air their dirty laundry is appalling.
Because we make posts onto the computer, we allow ourselves to say things that we would never have the courage to say to each others faces. It is so much easier to be cruel, sarcastic and plain rude on a computer. It is so much easier to take whatever someone has posted on their status or used as their flair and take offense from that. We are a narcissistic society, we believe that everything others do or say has something to do or is caused by us. We react to it and thus more hurt feelings, more misunderstanding.

Many times, social networking can create exclusion towards one another.

You know the person is on, they updated their status. You know they were on for a while, their farm was fertilized. They have been on regularly; their fence around their farm is finished.
But there was never any effort in contact. Not a comment, not a word. Never.

When you actually meet, there is that whole routine about missing you, about wishing for more time to spend together, for more interaction, for more, more, more…

And then you realize, the people who are not part of your immediate circle are not there by choice.

When a relationship is good and it flows, it flows everywhere and anywhere. It grows and it is nourished by all things that you do. It may take time, but it is time given unconditionally. It may take some nurturing, but it is nurturing that enriches the giver and the receiver. When feelings are hurt, there is compassion and understanding that together you can make things right and there is even space, to think things away from each other, only to come back and share them.
You may have a thousand facebook friends, but how many of them are real friends?

Many of you will think that I am insane, that EVERYONE knows that facebook is a tool; it is just something fun that you do. That there are no feelings involved and others actions and interactions do not affect you. For the other 99% of the population, social networking is great but it is also an empty shell.

The 3000 friends on your profile will post on your account, like your status and even help you kill the idiot who attacked you on the five minutes it took to get you home from work. But when stuff hits the fan, it is only a precious few that will give you a hand to stand back up.

Many understand, in theory, the true distinction between friends and facebook friends. But many act otherwise. They are on facebook in the morning while they drink their coffee, at work during their break, in the afternoon while dinner defrosts in the microwave and right before bed and every other time in between.

Social networking has created a shift in our day to day routines. We look incessantly to see if someone has commented to our status, if someone responded to our message or to see if our meal is ready in café world.

The internet alone is considered to be one of the biggest timesinks of our time, but facebook users have surpassed that by far. In studies it was found that people who have facebook will spend 3 times the amount of time online than they do visiting all other websites, combined. That means that if you were usually a ten-minute- check in and check out kind of person, if you are a facebook user, you spend up to 30 minutes a day on social networking.

Then people wonder why we are an obese and out of shape nation!!!

There are so many things that you could be doing in those 30 minutes.

You can exercise, you can finish that to-do list, you could read a really good book, you could meditate, you could play with your kids, make love to your spouse, create a new playlist on your ipod, or you could call that someone who is important to you and tell them how much they mean to you. The possibilities are endless.

The internet has eroded our social skills. Our kids are growing up to accept virtual relationships as a given, the art of socializing with actual people is being lost. Our ability to read body language, to develop and cultivate friendships, all of that is becoming something of the past. What’s more, people all over the world are becoming aware of a sense of emptiness inside of us, a sense of disconnection that something is missing. I can assure you it is not that you are missing another car or another gadget, you are missing interpersonal relationships, and you are missing the warmth of another human being.

The technological advances are wonderful. We have become a global community and we are able to reach information a million times faster than generations before, but I don’t think that we were supposed to sacrifice one knowledge for another. We were not supposed to lose that sense of REAL community, of family, of real friends, of real people. We are hyper busy, we are constantly doing things and going places, our time is sacred, what should you be spending your time on?

Time is what we have, we can have more money, more friends, more everything, but time given away never comes back to us.

NEVER.