Have We Forgotten How to Sustain Deeper Relationships Due To Web 2.0?
After I published my last post regarding the psychological aspects behind Web 2.0’s success, I received a great deal of feedback from you guys. One of my readers, Ahuvah, told me about the post that she had just written entitled How The Internet Ruined My Social Skills.
In her post, Ahuvah writes:
“Facebook replaced the phone calls and emails. Why pick up the phone and spend money when you could share your entire life via one site? My pictures, videos, blog posting, email, etc. are all displayed and sent via Facebook. I check Facebook more times a day than I’d like to count. I could chose to read the messages, flick through the pictures and read my friends walls to see what is going on with their lives without ever having to directly ask them “How are you?”
The downfall is that now in order for me to really connect to my friends I need to start all over. I need to learn how to have a conversation that does not bore me with the details. I cannot scan a conversation looking for the key points. I need to remember that people communicate differently in person then they do online.”
Ahuvah adds that technology is great but we should always remember that technology does not replace face-to-face connections.
I can relate to this post as well. On the surface, it seems that many of us are so used to online relationships now that we forgot how to have deeper relationships in which we invest more in than just a poke or sending a drink to someone. It seems that we are all in a sort of ”me” phase right now. We upload links, pictures, videos of ourselves and scan our friends’ information for what interests us, looking for the “key tags”, but not necessarily really “listening” to what they have to say. Then again, is it even humanely possible to deeply connect with as many friends as we each have on all the different social networks?
My opinion is that Facebook, Twitter, and other such platforms allow us to connect on some level with many more people than we ever could have before these platforms came into existence. And it’s not only more people that we connect with, but more people from all over the globe. Most chances are that we would have never even met those people if we did not have these platforms. Therefore I think that we as humans are trying to find new ways to adapt to this new situation of sustaining as many relationships as we have today.
No longer is the question of “what is Karen in Australia up to”? relevant. We all know what Karen is up to if she updates her Facebook and Twitter status on a regular basis and let’s us know about her daily activities. So yes, perhaps I don’t go over every single detail on Karen’s profiles, but on the whole, I know more about what Karen’s doing on a daily basis than I would have known if I did not have these networks.
I do think the point that Ahuvah makes regarding the fact that nothing replaces face-to-face connections is important. Of course there is nothing deeper than a meeting between two close friends sharing personal details with one another. However, I do think that in this age of technology, we are growing accustomed to sustaining many types of relationships with different people in our lives. With some we meet on a regular basis, others we may poke and send Facebook messages to on a daily basis, and yet with others we may only have a “blogging” relationship where we comment on each other’s posts. This is a new age for us – an age where we can connect with more people than ever before – and we need to learn how to do that without losing our “core” relationship skills.
What do you guys think? Do you feel that your relationship skills have deteriorated due to social networking? Did you forget how to sustain deeper relationships with people or are you just adapting to the new situation at hand?
Thanks to Honest for the beautiful pic.
