Everyone has a treasure, that if an emergency were to break out, they'd grab and take with them. Although I have no problem throwing out paper, and am not a collector by any means, my treasure is a keepsake box, that holds a bundle of cards and letters that I've been given over the years. Some might label this as sentimental, I think it's an affirmation of my life and of something joyful; it's a boost to get mail and it's an act of caring when someone reaches out.
I remember the old days when we wrote letters to relatives and friends in distant lands, when we phoned the ones nearby to keep in touch.
A few days ago waiting for my bangs to be trimmed at a hair salon, as a father was called to get his hair-cut, he departed handing his six year-old his cell phone, instructing him to use it as a toy. Meanwhile, educational blocks that the salon provided that were age-appropriate to inspire a child's intellectual development sat in the corner gathering dust. As a child I went to the beauty shop with my mother. In those days children's toys were not provided, only at a Doctors office would you find children's books; but I was rarely bored, I relied on my imagination to keep me occupied and intrigued.
An opportunity to use your imagination, to sit with yourself and just be, or read the words of others; little of that today exists, because everyone is on the social network craze.
I signed up half-heartedly on Facebook and haven't done a thing with it. Out of the loop, I recognize the "convenience" of social networking but at my core, I believe it to be more of a hindrance to our future than a progressive step. Its privacy policies are confusing to most and it allows for information to be exposed in a number of ways. I think that's over-sharing and sheer self-display. Mark Zuckerberg who is the face behind Facebook has a film coming out next week, with an unauthorized version of him. He's known not to give interviews, we''ll see how he handles the exposure.
We are only Facebook's infancy stages, wait another fifteen years when it creates a massive amount of lonely, overweight and socially inept people who will grapple with how to make "real" friends, meet singles and see how the birth rate plummets.
Nor can I bring myself to finding out about new births through friends’ Facebook pages; or of people moving homes when the backgrounds of those pictures change.
No need for greeting cards, how about a poke instead – “Happy birthday, how are you?” No need to go to a birthday party any more – just have my friends upload grainy photographs from a wild party of one, captured on a cell phone camera, so that I could check them out and “be there.” No need to come to my parties either, I’ll just post pictures of myself on my Facebook page, blowing out twenty-nine candles on a supermarket cake, with only me in attendance.
Despite all this “social” networking, it must feel lonely out in Facebookland. Why is our culture obsessed with networking ourselves into obscurity? To feel guilty when you phone someone and get the real person as if you disturbed them; instead of voice mail is now becoming a common human reaction.
Who would rather be sitting with their spouse on the same sofa and texting each other instead of conversing? I see it all the time in restaurants and at parties, so why not at home? We may get some peace and quiet (other than for those tic-tic sounds of keyboards or phone pads). And in fifteen years from now, our vocal chords wasted away and we will have ended up with a poor vocabulary populated with “Hi5, OMG, LOL, ” and other acronyms that I am trying hard to tune out.
In these days of cheap long-distance phone calls and free video conferencing, I think we need the face-to-face more than the face-book. I wonder when the tide will change; when our minds will yearn for imagination, when we have to re-learn to spell correctly, when our sore thumbs will ache for a rest, our vocal chords thirst for exercise, and our souls hunger for the presence of other souls to remind us that we exist, and are defined, only in relation to one another.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooupzNgybEo
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