This started out as a comment but ended up fleshing out quite nicely.
Lihy wrote in her post that if you deleted friends from your facebook or decided to stop answering emails, people would get upset with you, and that this is caused by the fact that conversations and phone calls have been replaced by these social networking tools. Imagine for a minute, what if a phone call or a face to face conversation was the highest-tech method for communicating? If you suddenly stopped talking to people or stopped calling them, would they not be just as upset, if not moreso? The way I see it, the reason you are chained to facebook and email is not because they are technology, but because you are chained to social interaction. Man enters into definite relations, independent of his will, because it his nature as a social being.
You could also look at being chained to facebook and email as being chained to high technology in general. This addiction humanity has is not limited to social networking groups. You use facebook and email instead of face to face conversations and phone calls the same way you take a car or a bus or a plane home instead of walking or riding a horse. The new technology expands the rate at which you can accomplish whatever task you have at hand, be it communication or travel.
As for the heightened social awareness and self-centeredness that is so rampant on facebook? It is my view that there will always be people who are concerned overmuch with such things, and will meticulously construct their image as viewed by peers, be it on facebook or in real life. Again, facebook simply accelerates the entire process. If you’ve ever read The Sun Also Rises or The Great Gatsby, it’s clear that in these pre-facebook times, a person’s image can still be fine-tuned to the finest detail if a person so wishes. Hemingway’s Lost Generation is made up of the same people who would be on facebook to the wee hours of the morn, deciding what music to like and what pictures to display, in the hopes that all others would see and approve. The thirst for attention is inherent to all humans, and exists to varying degrees in all of us. Facebook doesn’t make us attention whores, it just makes it easier to express. A person who puts in effort to be fake on facebook will put in just as much effort in real life, and would have put in just as much effort fifty years ago. Just as the communication and travel examples, facebook is simply a higher-tech way of doing this, with more rapid and more substantial returns.
One Response to ''
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I haven’t read Lihy’s post yet, so I hope this comment doesn’t lose any validity because of that. I think what you said about all this facebook stuff is true. I’m not sure if you were refuting some of Lihy’s claims, but that’s how it seems (geez, it would probably just be easier if I read it). So I guess my point is that I strongly agree that with or without facebook, people who are arrogant are still going to be full of themselves, and since facebook really helps them speed up the process of making an ass of themselves, this would be a good example of technology can be “dangerous.” I mean, it’s not like a great big danger to society to have arrogant people, but it I don’t think it helps anything. I just see that technology can be very ambiguous. Even if it’s something as small as facebook, or as something as dangerous as weapons, technology seems to never be entirely white or black. I don’t know if that’s because of misuse by humans, or the way that technology can change perspective, but it is certainly true that one thing can be used for very different purposes.
Gautam Srikishan
3 Nov 08 at 8:34 pm