The Independent is running a set of essays on the internet asking “Are we losing our culture?” With the rise of technologies like facebook and twitter it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of the opposing argument and ask how it could possibly be? we all seem so connected today:
“The contrast between the transitory nature of a Facebook status update and the permanence of death made me wonder if all this social networking is actually a way of keeping people at a distance – a way of having a “friend” but not having any of the commitments and duties of friendship. When the sci-fi novelist William Gibson first put forward the notion of “cyberspace”, he described it as a “consensual hallucination”, where we pretend we are together, when in reality we are alone.”
Full story at The Independent
I have three friends I would hate more than anything to lose. One of them is an aussie, and possibly my best friend, I only know him online. Emotional living is kinda of a shared illusion to isn’t it?
The ‘Net has done a little of both.
I’ve just written a dissertation on this very subject. My thesis looks at Internet and television and whether that is driving us apart.
We’re as apart as we always were. Just now we can broadcast it to anyone who’s surfing by.
Suit yourself I’d say. The internet can be anything you want .. as it is with life outside the internet. For some it will seem as been driven away from people .. to others it is the opposite. Simple psychology in the back. Lack of physical presence does not work for some people.
Don’t focus so weird on the internet. Many people can’t do without anymore, aside their own life outside the internet, it added something, no more ;proof needed. Those who hate the internet .. well, they should check their own inside a bit and try to find out why … And if life outside the internet serves them better/more … easy choice. But it is at times more the people around that all of a sudden were no longer available to them … for obvioius reasons most likely. Interactions, whereever, should serve both or more sides. That’s also the main issue.
The internet has really helped people stay in contact in my opinion but maybe without it people would make more effort to meet up with each other in person on a regular basis?
It has certainly changed the way in which a lot of people interact, and a lot of the social cues we take from face to face contact are missing, leaving the participant blissfully building a ficticious image of the feelings of others.
People used to have tone and expression to enhance and expand on the emotions behind the conversation. Now they are placing their own internal views on the written words they read.
Granted, some insight ‘can’ be formed of the individual; but it is very loose and prone to being wrong.
It’s a boon for social inept’s such as myself though; we get the chance to edit our words
I have about 20 friends on Facebook. Half are good friends who are geographically distant and half are famous people I gathered for ego fulfilling reasons.
Famous, to me, means having your own Wiki entry. Yes, I am that shallow.
i agree with those who say both. do you know your neighbor’s name & what they do for a living? we may know those things about our email pals (or not), but do we know what they look like? we may know both about our facebook “friends”, but is what they say true…or the cyber equivalent of bar talk?
it goes both ways.
too late to ask this now don’t you think?
I started using Twitter as i heard Mr Brown was a user, then all of a sudden i became addicted!
: D
But the positive side to this is the amount of lovely people i have met via Derren and twitter. Because they are not physically there i still consider them friends. I’m even meeting up with 2 Twitter friends to see Derren’s Enigma show in Glasgow!
Never used the interweb for this social thingy (he says with TweetDeck open looking at his Twitter, Myspace, Linkedin and Facebook accounts).
For someone like me who is very shy and struggles to make/keep friends, Twitter/Facebook etc, are a sort of lifeline (esp Twitter where I’ve made some lovely friends on there). Don’t get me wrong, I’m not compensating that for real life, but it’s still a lovely way to chat to people from all places & all walks of life.
I have even met up with some friends in the past who I got to know through the internet. None of it worked out, but it was a good experience for me!
All I will say with re to the net & social networking, that nothing feels the same as a REAL hug or a REAL kiss. No matter how many times you ‘say’ it to someone online…..
LC x
I feel the most lonely i ever have and it started when i began studying computer network’s at uni.
I met my now boyfriend over the internet. He was from Liverpool, I was from Derby. We are in our 5th year together and now live together in Liverpool.
The internet can be an escape for some people – but it can also be a great way to meet like minded people who you wouldn’t have otherwise met.
I can see that it makes sarcasm and similar conversational tactics difficult due to the lack of “tone” of voice, but it also teaches a person how to get their point of view across in an eloquent way (that makes clear, logical sense to a variety of readers) in the written form which is surely a good thing for formal letter/email writing and for future careers for some, younger internet users?
I can see both sides to the argument.
just wait til virtual sex is perfected–we’ll never see a live human again! :0
My oldest firendship is with someone I met 22 years ago, during a weeks vacation in a foreign country. I will likely never meet that person again. Since that meeting we’ve written (pen and paper, now email) as our only way of communicating. If you value friendship by physical closeness I think you don’t really know what friendship is.
Maybe it is because, before the internet, I had several penpals with whom I exchanged letters. Most I have never met. However, the way you build trust exchanging letters is more intense and focused. Also in that time, I wrote letters with two schoolfriends, people that I met on a daily basis. One of them, I married and we are still very happy. In case you wondered, we don’t write each other letters anymore.
I sense a false dichotomy of sorts, placing ‘real friendship’ against ‘internet friendship’.
For me, the internet and the social networks I use (Twitter, Facebook) enhance my life. It’s another way to keep in touch with your ‘real’ friends, and a fantastic way to be part of a fluid online community (like the ARG people). I don’t think an ‘online’ friend is of any less value than a ‘real life’ friend – it’s just different. Meeting people on the internet doesn’t have the stigma it once had. I personally think, so long as people keep an unconscious balance between real life and online friends, there’s not a problem
.
It’s brought us together in much sense, now we have practically all the information from each other that we could want, we have new ways to express human behaviour, BUT, it depends on how the internet is used, and where you look, what you do, etc. There’s people who won\’t look at what a person writes and acknowledge that’s another REAL LIFE person, they’d rather see it as a product of the internet. To accept how someone is expressing theirself they need to be personal about it, and you can know that person, even if through the wrong path. Myself, i\’ve met 3 people IRL through the internet, Danish, Dutch and English, English friend had issues with family which made my stay horrible, I met the Dutch and Danish guy at same time, they were both awesome, as I expected, we knew each other for long enough, was an awesome vacation.
“where we pretend we are together, when in reality we are alone.” That’s bollocks too, we are all connected, this is actually benefiting our connection, even though we’re not consciously aware of it yet, this is progress. We’re realising and waking up, and the internet has played a monumental part of this.
Yes, and home taping is killing music.
The internet is one of mankind’s greatest accomplishments (I hesitate to say “the greatest” but I think it’s fairly close). I spend a lot of time on facebook and I spend a lot of time with my friends, when I can, but as I recently moved to Germany there are a lot of them I don’t see very often, except online. Of course networking sites create the illusion that you’re keeping in touch with people when really you aren’t, but guess what? If it weren’t for facebook I wouldn’t be in contact with those people AT ALL. I think people who criticise social networking sites on such grounds don’t understand them even remotely, “The contrast between the transitory nature of a Facebook status update and the permanence of death” being a case in point. How on earth is something being transitory a valid criticism?
Depends if you use it to enhance your life or to replace it.
- haha – well said – it’s certainly replaced my love life – Phillis