Posts Tagged ‘United Kingdom’

Lately, there has been lot of bizarre writing on how the hotspots of the internet, be that Facebook or Twitter or anything else, is bad for you.  The Guardian covers some of the fluff here.

I must admit I am beginning to tire of the headlines, formulaic as they are. Apparently, Facebook can kill, divorce you,  deprive you of good old fashioned hugs, eat your pet and so on. (OK, so I made up the last one – slap me!)

Twitter is even more disastrous – it can give you cancer as social isolation (read interacting in online environments) alter our genes.  (PDF link to piece of sensationalist research)
I quote:

One of the most pronounced changes in the daily habits of British citizens is a reduction
in the number of minutes per day that they interact with another human being. Recent his-
tory has seen people in marked retreat from one another as Britain moves from a culture of
greater common experience to a society of more isolated experience. She is in good com-
pany, as Americans too step back from one another in unprecedented magnitude.

I feel like crying. For what exactly does it mean to interact with another human being?

Every day I take the tube to work. Every day, there a millions on that tube. Every day, I stare at people while I hardly interact with anyone. Unless I bump into them, in which case they’ll let out some mean hisses before they turn their backs at me.

Every day, I go on Twitter. Every day, I post replies to people who talk directly to me – people I know, people I don’t know. Every day, I respond to someone’s tweet with my own thoughts on a subject. I ask for favours. I return favours. We make jokes, we laugh, we share, and sometimes, we even meet up.

I confess – I can’t hear their voices. I recognize them only by the way the present themselves (yes, those weirdly creative avatars or close up photos). And I can’t touch them (mouse clicks don’t count, do they?). So I guess, the moral of the story is this:

All this time, I’ve been fooling myself. I’m retreating from the world rather then getting closer to it. In unprecedented magnitude.

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