We are witnessing the death of social experience. It spans every generation and it permeates even the youngest and most innocent among us. My heart breaks each time I see another kid sitting across the table from his parents and siblings at a restaurant, and rather than discussing life and all of the things that are out there in the world, their noses are all stuck in their Androids and iPhones; and what are they doing? They are checking up on everybody else, most of whom are in turn checking up on them. We are people doing nothing but watching other people do nothing; all the while wondering why everyone is so boring.
Every time I'm part of a social gathering of any kind, I can invariably find members of the group sitting and scrolling through their Facebook newsfeeds. How stale and stunted the personalities in the room must be if the daily motions of mere acquaintances can pull you out of an actual experience. People like to talk about living in the moment, but I'm starting to doubt that many people can even recognize a moment as it occurs. The need to find what else is going on in the lives of others perpetually destroys your appreciation for what is going on in front of you. The extent to which we have allowed our lives to be digitized is disturbing. There is a whole world full of interesting people and events around us and we can't see beyond our touch-screens. We are like babies in a photo session who have finally lost interest in visually exploring the room and are focused only on the dancing puppet beside the camera.
Human interaction has been diluted to the point where anything not accompanied by a comment box is almost alien. People seem to prefer poorly punctuated and misspelled text to a human voice. The ability to converse in real-time is suffering. Our conversations, which used to be limited only by the extent of our knowledge or by our depth of opinion, are now limited by character-count and data usage. We also no longer need reasons for blowing people off. "I didn't get ur txt" works wonders. We almost don't need to be real people anymore. Our social network profiles and text-based relationships have become like our great wizards; all-knowing, powerful and overall bad-ass. The problem is that the people behind the curtains are also fooled by their own smoke and mirrors.
How much of an identity can you really have if your most consuming curiosity is the minutiae of the lives of others? Whenever we check our newsfeeds, I'm pretty sure we all do the same thing: we log in, we hope to see something interesting, we begin scrolling, we continue scrolling, we realize that we are wasting time, we scroll some more, we wonder how we ended up "friends" with many of the people we see, we feel better about our own intellect, we refresh the page and hope that somebody has posted something interesting in the time it took to learn that nobody has posted anything interesting, we sigh and scroll...
As a side note, I love how a hot girl can post any type of dog-shit drivel she wants and immediately have 36 "likes" and 28 comments. Guys, keep on "liking" those pseudo-artsy self pics of girls lying on their beds and throwing up peace signs. She will fuck you eventually. You're doing great. She totally knows you exist. Oh, and when she posts an angsty status about men, don't forget to respond with a comment about how she deserves better and that some guys just don't understand or appreciate when they've found the perfect girl. If you are not a hot chick, stop posting things. Nobody gives a shit. That goes for me and for this blog as well, but as a man I will never know any better, so here it is.
In the age of smartphones and social-networking it seems we have finally found the ultimate way to bullshit each other and ourselves while also finding a perfect way to ignore each other. You can mentally check-out of any situation while at the same time digitally "checking-in" to the same situation. You can be in two places at once without necessitating full intellectual or emotional attendance in either place. It's the ultimate armor for your ego. Only through this relatively new medium of communication has such a cold concept given us such a warm and fuzzy feeling.
And, conversely,when you live in a world where the people you interact with are lazy dullards with singular prattlings about absolutely nothing, blankly staring when you pose an idea that lofts above the most banal of issues, then, social media becomes an oasis. Just had to get that out of my system. ;-)
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