Technology and Social Interaction

I think technology has really impacted the way we socially interact with people. I feel like I rarely spend that much face-to-face time with some of my closest friends because I’m too busy to go visit their room, or walk over to their house. Its way too easy to text and facebook each other that I lose a lot of face-to-face interaction with people. However, there are definitely a lot of positives but also some negatives to how technology has impacted social interactions. For one, technology has made talking and connecting with many people soooo much easier by giving us different mediums to use that save us a lot of time. Although facebook, texting, and other social medias take away our face-to-face time with people, I personally would find myself hardly staying in touch with people because I don’t have the time to go visit every single friend I have. Even though my social interactions a lot of the time come to texting or facebook, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing because otherwise I would probably NEVER have time to stay in touch with a lot of people. It’s too bad face-to-face interaction can be so difficult to arrange sometimes, but technology has become a positive in the way it still allows us to connect with people we can’t see in person at the moment or all the time. I think for a lot of people though, technology has become an easy way out of having to spend time with people in person. It’s so convenient that people take advantage of it too much and use it as a way to communicate when they could just call someone up and meet them in person to chat. Instead of visiting a friend, people just facebook chat them on facebook, or sent them a text message. It’s made some of our social interactions so impersonal.

I think using the internet to meet other people is weird. It’s a good way for people with social anxiety, or other things that inhibit them from interacting with people in person well, but otherwise it’s turning our social world to a virtual world where eventually people will have trouble interacting in person. Some things like craigslist or message boards are okay for people with similar interests or need to sell something to a mass audience, but using online dating sites to meet a partner is kind of cheating the system. What happened to meeting people in the flesh and then dating? Why do we need some website to try to match us with people based on questions for compatibility? I don’t think its a viable way to make meaningful relationships. Yeah, sometimes the online dating sites work for people.. so yahoo for them, but online gaming places or virtual worlds like Second Life are not places where I think truly meaningful relationships take places. To some extent maybe they can, like for people who need to talk with someone totally anonymous for emotional support. But otherwise I think the virtual and online world is taking away our ability to make connecting and lasting relationships with real people we can see in person. I feel bad arguing that online relationships or one that take place online aren’t good for us because I do think that sometimes they can be beneficial at times and for certain people, but as a whole I don’t know if it’s good for people to be having solely or mostly online/virtual relationships with people. I think it is going to be hard to create more “real” spaces for people to connect and talk about issues because of the internet and how much it has opened the world up to us. It offers something that public places cannot--whether that’s gonna be a good thing or hurt us in the end I’m not sure yet. People are lazy and the internet makes it easy and accessible to talk, connect, socialize, and discuss topics with people that our face-to-face communication is going to continue to be greatly affected by technology. 

Social Networking and Privacy

Social networking- it’s the fad of our generation. It’s what keeps us updated, connected, and in loop with our friends, family, and acquaintances. I find myself on facebook a lot. It’s hard to not move my mouse up to my bookmarks bar on safari and click on the little button that says “facebook.” It’s almost like an addiction. It passes the time, keeps me entertained, and gives me a feeling of connectedness to all my friends, and the rest of my community. Recently I’ve been too busy to spend a lot of time on facebook, but when I’m bored I do find myself spending a lot of time on facebook. Also, I find myself checking facebook via the internet on my blackberry to see status updates and see if I have any new notifications. It’s usually when I have a few moments of boredom waiting in line in benson, or after a boring long class, but it’s sometimes nice to still be connected to facebook even when I don’t have the time to sit down and log into my computer. It makes me realize though how multi connected we all are to facebook, whether its from the internet on your phone, to a text message alerting you of a notification, or an e-mail saying someone posted something on your wall; there are so many ways to stay informed by facebook that its totally engrained in our lives. One social network site I will never get involved with is FourSquare. I think it’s super weird and unnecessary to “check-in” to sites to alert your friends and get points. People don’t need to know that you were just at “McDonalds” or just checked-in to a local shopping mall. Who really cares. It’s so insignificant. There are much more interesting things to pay attention to and get updated on than where your friends or people you barely know are. I think programs like FourSquare and now the Facebook places are just inflating peoples egos that people actually care where they are or where they’ve been. I would be more likely to follow an interesting Twitter feed (which probably won’t happen), than play into the FourSquare or Facebook places fad. 

I’m not a huge user of Facebook status updates. I know there are a lot of people who update their facebook status’s, telling people where they are going or what they are doing, but I don’t think your entire Facebook circle needs to know stupid things like “[insert name here] is watching TV.” Don’t get me wrong, I like that people can have status’s on Facebook; a lot of the time they are funny or interesting and keep me updated on peoples lives. But it bugs me when people put unnecessary and stupid status’s up. Like expressing super deep emotions or constantly telling every detail of their life to the point where their entire Wall is just status updates. I personally think status updates should be saved for fun things, or interesting big events going on in your life. I still would much prefer to text or bbm my friends, and I spend a lot of time texting. I’m practically attached to my phone. I think it’s just become part of our culture though that our generation is so glued to our cellphones that we also expect instant responses from friends, and get offended when people have read our bbms but haven’t responded. (I know I do). I definitely do think that our culture is moving towards constant access and social networking as a main form of communication. I think overall though it has had a positive effect on society because I honestly can’t imagine my life without texting, and the different forms of social networking. I think it’s really opened a lot of doors to how we communicate and stay in touch with people. Without social networking I think we would lose a lot of communication and connection with people that we want to stay in the loop with, but otherwise would find hard to. There are some drawbacks though. Our lives have become so intertwined with technology that when we don’t have technology we freak out. If the internet doesn’t work, we get stressed out. If our phone breaks, we worry about who might be trying to get ahold of us. If we don’t have access to a computer, we feel helpless. Technology has a lot of benefits but it’s definitely spoiling us in the sense that without it we don’t know what to do. Technology is awesome, but I think everyone needs to make sure they have found a balance between too much exposure and reliance on technology, and making sure they utilize some of its benefits. 

Despite all the technology, social networks sites, and the internet I don’t really think about my privacy too much. I make sure my Facebook settings only allow my friends to access my information and pictures, but aside from that I don’t agonize over whose looking at my profile or tracking my online usage. I have nothing to hide, and nothing to be ashamed about. What some tech nerd in Washington D.C. might be doing with my internet history doesn’t bother me right now at least because who really cares what I google search or who I facebook creep on as long as I’m not doing anything illegal. I do think though that the thought of the technological footprint we will accumulate by the time we die is kind of creepy. I bet by the time we’re about to die, there would be some way to track down every single internet search we’ve done, phone call we’ve made, credit card purchase, and track where we’ve been for our entire lives. I think as technology right now is still in it’s early years relatively speaking, privacy is something we should be thinking about for the future, but not freaking out about right now (to some degree).