He wrote all about how we stalk eachother online-- through facebook, through instant messenger-- and how we ALL do it. And it's true, as college students, we soak up any opportunity to avoid doing work, to pass away the Sunday afternoons or to avoid finishing the paper that's due in 2 hours. It's undeniable that we do it, and yet as Joe pointed out, a lot of us are alittle ashamed of it.
But why? Why is it embarrassing and hard to admit that we find out stuff about eachother online? That we communicate our feelings and ideas and actions even better through an away message or the "About Me" part of our facebook profile than when we actually sit down and talk? Well, my feeling is that we're embarrassed because of just that: the internet allows us to be passive participants in each other's lives, and we're humiliated to a certain extent that we often can learn more about eachother by reading what we write in these public forums than by actually asking eachother, than by any of us willingly volunteering that information or establishing any sort of active dialogue.
Granted, I'm just as big a victim of this as anyone. I write more of my feelings in this little blog thing than I tell anyone to their face...which is awkward, because strangers read this more than people I actually know. It doesn't seem make sense, but it does. Because, as I'm writing this, I'm pouring out my ideas and feelings in an empty room to an inadament computer, and I'm posting it because I know that these thoughts are something that I should be sharing with others: with my friends, with someone. It's just easier when I don't have to see or hear the reaction that everyone has. I throw the information out into the open and ask for no response.
It's kind of like text messaging. I told Jonna last night: I love text messaging because it makes it so much easier to communicate. I text message someone when I want to talk to them or tell them something but I'm too afraid to hear their answer or I don't want to have to respond to them on the spot. Texting for me is all too often a passive aggressive way of getting what I want or hearing what I want but without the pressure of the voice on the other line. It's so pathetic, but it's so true...and I feel it with everyone. I think we all do it, or at least a lot of us.
The point is that all this technology has allowed us to stray away and avoid what used to be absolute necessity. We don't need to face eachother anymore to communicate. We don't even need to communicate directly in order to glean a lot of insight and information about others-- even strangers. And perhaps most frightening is the fact that we never have to talk to eachother in order to understand one another-- we don't even have to look at the other person to know what's going on in their life. And that's terrifying, because we can be abstractly connected to eachother by just sitting in an empty room on a Sunday afternoon writing to an inadament computer and still have "friends."
posted by iliza @ 1:28 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home