Sanjay
‘Facebook is a great tool to keep in touch with many friends at once,’ I said to an old pal who was expressing discontent that nowadays people have time to post several updates a day but none for a personal call. How’s this as a pitch for Facebook: In touch with many, close to none! Clearly, a shared medium cannot serve the same needs as a close personal friendship. Sure, your friends list is over 100, but how many close friendships do you have? Do you feel the closeness during a Facebook interaction? As a tool we like and appreciate what Facebook can do, but is it making us reluctant to engage in personal contact which requires more time and emotional effort?
The rate of technological change and its effect on society has been brisk in the last two decades. I grew up in Mumbai of the 1980s. There were no computers and no cell phones near where I grew up. In fact, my family had no telephone at all until I was in my teens. Calling a friend meant standing under his balcony and shouting out his name until he shouted back his status update. This was a daily ritual during the summer vacations. Discussions about the day’s plans were often carried out between three kids, two in their respective balconies and one on the ground. Through the usual sports and pastimes for kids at that age, a close camaraderie developed and it got us through the teens and into college. Hostel(dorm) friends were just as close or even closer due to a common living environment and the shared stresses of academic life. Cack sessions, or face-to-face chats, lasted all night some nights and covered every issue inconsequential or not.
Today we are all grown up, most of us are married, and almost all of us are scattered across the globe, away from the neighbourhood where we grew up. Making close local friends in the new places we move to every so often, is not easy even for the most social amongst us. No worries, Facebook to the rescue. Facebook allows us to know where our lost friends are, and for those of us who actively post updates, also what they are doing, reading or even thinking. But is it the same as the interactions we had when we locked shoulders before a competitive match or ate together in the hostel mess? Is there a communal feeling of being in this together, with shared hopes and aspirations? Do we even know what our friends’ hopes and aspirations are anymore? Are we contributing to their success and sharing their joys? Is clicking “Like” in response to their accomplishments enough? Does a comment of condolence in response to our grief give us the perk that our neurobiology demands from our support network? Where is the “hug tight” button?
Today’s youngsters are no doubt more comfortable with the online nature of their social network, yet technological change is leaving evolutionary biology far behind and leading to increasingly isolated lives with nothing but the immediate family, if that, to provide the support that we need. Even where a healthy supportive family does exist, relying on only family for emotional support seems to me a one-legged stool. Even though the strongest leg is still attached, there is no balance.
It is the eve of Diwali, a bright, joyous and noisy festival in India, and I feel a nostalgic craving for the close presence of family and friends whose support I count on and who likewise, count on me. Wish you a Happy Diwali and hope that your New Year will be full of close friendships! A good way to start: Visit, Call and Write to people this Diwali weekend. Unless, of course, what you really want is to post a wish on Facebook and be done with it.
Contributed on a contemplative day by Sanjay, a social guy with over one hundred Facebook friends.
Filed under: Life Tools, Philosophy, Technology
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Enjoyed reading this. I dont even consider myself very social yet miss most of the things you said. I think man is a communal animal, so especially young kids who’ve got their priorities from nature, enjoy a communal environment better. However in the capitalist state we live in where the individual is emphasized over the social, where single family homes are emphasized over apartment buildings, the kids experience growing up is already not as rich as ours was. So Facebook is probably not that different for them. OTOH, every generation probably says that they had more fun growing up than the next gen did.
It is true. A tweet or a poke are definately not comparable to a phone call that can deliver a rich message straight from your mind. In today’s world with the increasing technology advancement we are continously searching and inventing more new and richer software tools to improve communication, which is ironic considering that fact that undistorted personal communication is rarely possible even with a personal call or personal visit and face-to-face talk for that matter. Because sometimes we think we know what the other person is saying to us when he/she speaks to us, but rarely understand the deeper meaning behind it, same applies to the source or originator of the message. Ever been in such a situation ? I can see it all the time around me. It’s because people no matter how close through their biological roots don’t understand each other, some exceptional relations exist ofcourse where one does not have to say a word for other person to understand. But how many of our relations are like that and how many of us really own such relations and actually cherish them?
Cherishing a relationship is important and what’s important even more is for one to know himself better than he/she thinks he/she knows. It is then, that communication does not convert itself into miscommunication. with all these social networking websites and tools like netscape, skype etc make us into believing that we live in global village, and we can stay in different countries and still be close to family/friends who needs us, all a big lie. If anything they are a means of creating loose ends for any personal relations.
I personally feel that personal communication is a vast subject and it all boils down to how true human you are and how grounded you are to your soul.
@shy_butterfly: Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I took a class in communication once, and one of the texts exploring the subject explained that communication involves the transmission of thoughts between two or more people. The sender translates the thought into language (words, posture, expression, etc.) before he can transmit it. At the receiver’s end, the language is absorbed and then decoded back into thoughts. There is a loss at each stage of the process leading to incomplete transfer of the thought. So apparently studies show that you can have two people, who are for example, married for forty or so years and so think they understand each other perfectly, and yet who are not able to achieve 100% accuracy in communication.