Over the summer, I was exposed to a website called Twitter. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a website where people post short “micro-blog” entries about random daily activities, like going shopping or walking the dog. Thinking this was a new thing, I told all my friends about it. They then proceed to laugh at me, calling me grandpa and asking me if I was about to crap my pants. Apparently this site has been up since 2006. Whoops.
Nevertheless, the idea of a website like Twitter irritates me, and further supports my theory that people are slowly starting to sever themselves off from one another. We build up these giant walls around ourselves, using Myspace, Facebook and Twitter as the bricks. We post our likes and dislikes all over these walls, but how much do we really know about the people behind them?
I went on the Twitter site to get a sense of why a site like this was needed. The explanation? “Because even basic updates are meaningful to family members, friends, or colleagues—especially when they’re timely.”
Really? Do we really need a website just for that? What happened to the days when we picked up our phones and called our friends to just talk? I may be in the minority here, but if I saw, say, two hobos wrestling over a sandwich at a bus stop, my initial reaction is not to log onto Twitter and post about it. I’d rather pick up a phone and call my friends to tell them. At least that way, we can share a laugh. Plus, it’s in real-time. Posting about it on the internet is like tossing a message in a bottle out to sea. Who knows who or when someone is going to see it?
Privacy becomes an issue. You may think your Facebook is private, but there aren’t any secrets on the internet. Anyone with a browser and some time on their hands can find you in cyberspace. It’s funny: we broadcast all this information about ourselves all over the internet, yet we still act surprised when our inbox fills up with messages from creepy 40 year old men wanting to see pictures of our feet.
That seems to be the main problem nowadays. All this technology makes reaching out to one another easier, but it somewhat cheapens the interactions. I had a friend who rarely picked up his cell phone. When I asked him why, he simply replied “Dude…Just text me.”
No, you ass. If I wanted to text you, I would’ve done it. I shouldn’t have to spend five minutes fumbling around on my keypad in order to text you a sentence that I could have told you in five seconds. Also, I’m not lucky enough to have an unlimited texting plan (I still use Cellular One as my phone service. Yes, you read that right. Maybe I really am a grandpa). It costs me ten cents for every text, and that eventually adds up, believe it or not. Text messaging is a shitty way of communicating in general. I’m not talking about the occasional text senders. I’m talking about the people who are on their phones 24/7, the ones whose fingers are permanently fused to their keypad. Rather than meeting someone in person and reading their facial expressions, or speaking with them and listening to the tone of their voice, we spend more time sending ambiguous messages back and forth to one another. Studies have shown that more than 40% of what you write in an email or text message is misunderstood. So rather than knowing what someone is truly saying, we end up interpreting all of our text messages by what we assume they mean. Emotions like sarcasm, joy, and bitterness are all lost in translation. We end up substituting our true feelings with little sideways emoticons.
By creating these walls between us, we’re slowly losing our acceptance for one another. Why do you think the bro at the last party you went to can drink an entire 30 rack before passing out in a pile of puke and piss? It’s because he’s built up a tolerance over the years. Much like that bro, people need to learn to build up a tolerance to other people. It’s the only way to survive in this world. It’s a guaranteed fact that you’re going to meet a lot of shit heads and jerks in your life. You won’t be able to change all of them, so the best way is to just learn to live with them. Yet, with all these networking sites that we have, it is way easier to simply avoid the irritating people rather than deal with them. By doing so, we have no ideas how to tolerate annoyance, so we flip out at the first sign of a problem, going berserk on the kid walking down the hallway too slowly.
In case you’re wondering, yes, I have a Facebook myself, and I do occasionally text. My gripe is not with everyone that uses networking sites or text messaging, but those that rely on them too heavily. Instead of treating them like tools, they become a crutch. The people that bother me are the ones that text when they are out eating dinner with friends, or the type of people that listen to their iPods while grocery shopping. A little interaction never hurt anyone, so go out and start mingling. Strike up a conversation with that smelly kid that sits next to you on the bus. He or she could end up being the love of your life. Or they could’ve just forgotten to shower. You never know…
