Sunday, November 7, 2010

The Anti-Social Network

   Watching the, The Social Network, has brought up one major problem which I feel needs to be considered.  Now, considering the fact that I am an avid facebooker, I probably have no place to say such things, but in my overall opinion, I feel that the whole facebook boom that has taken place over the last few years has lead to a sort of anti-social atmosphere to the world of friendshisp, and, even in some cases, relationships.  I have had numerous friends who have broken up with their girlfriends on facebook, or, even, in somewhat rarer cases, met girlfriends on facebook, and never even met with them in person, before breaking up with them on facebook.  For many, I feel they see facebook as more of a dating website, as it was originally intended to be, in the sense that, it is like the easy way out of doing the hard things in life, such as actually talking to people in person, and having to get to know them the old fashioned way.  I can see where the it can be easily used to get in touch with old high school buddies, or even relatives from across the country, but when it becomes a person's main source of communication to the outside world, I see it then on the same level as such virtuality reality computer games as, namely, Second Life.  In this game, every one creates an avatar, almost as like in The Sims, but instead of simply being in a small, virtual world, you are apart of "the gird," a world populated by avatars created by people from all over the world.  Basically, you can live your second life, without ever having to leave the confines of your own computer chair.  The same sort of lifestyle is shown throught the Bruce Willis film, Surrogates, where everyone is locked away in their homes, and living their lives through what are called surrogates.  They are robotic representaions of the humans, which are controlled by the human counterpart in their own home, in the specailly designed chairs.  This, once again, takes away the social aspect of life, and gives the users the easy way out of having to ingeract with real people in the real world.  Now, I know  no one really uses facebook as their only source of real world interaction, and I also know that these two examples are very drastic and, referring to the latter, somewhat unrealistic, but, if this trend of online social networks continues to grow, the possiblities are virtually endless, and, one day, the laptop that I am typing this blog up on could become my only source of real world knowledge and experience.

1 comment:

  1. I totally agree with you on this; Facebook is slowly eating away at real life relationships, and it is tragic. It is happening ever so slightly, but enough so that soon we won't even notice when we have very few real life friends, and a majority of online friends. I personally have no friends on Facebook that I don't know in real life, but I can see that Facebook is affecting my way of communicating even with my best friends. I can't think of the last time I called them on the phone, and just talked. It is so much easier to talk on Facebook or text. I am going to try and become less dependent on technology because I think the drastic isolated future sounds scary.

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