Well…the buzzword these days is social networking. If you are not on Facebook or Twitter you are really not in with the times. What however is interesting to me is the way such activities are redefining relationships and friendships.
In earlier times, you met a person, you talked, you met again, you talked and then slowly you would decide whether this person shared your wavelength or not. You took your time in deciding whether you would share something in common with this person. Slowly you would build an understanding, and take the relationship to a level to which you felt comfortable. You were able to see the person in flesh and blood. You were able to trust your five senses to judge and assess the other person’s reactions or their body language. You heard their voice and saw their face and well…it was a person to person engagement.
The flip side of this sort of arrangement was that it did not connect you with the millions of others who might have had things in common with you. You missed out on the whole wide world waiting out there who would have made for the best kind of friends you could have had. But then…back in those times you didn’t really think that it is possible to do such outlandish things. Those were the times before the internet.
Cut to today. Here we are now, the pre-internet generation slowly and reluctantly or quickly and eagerly as the case may be, taking to these social networking sites and trying to readjust perceptions of the art of meeting people and building friendships. Today, you can choose to “follow” whoever you like virtually via twitter and it’s got nothing to do with stalking. In fact, the follower numbers just lets others know how popular you are. You begin to talk to people you have never met. On Facebook, you can scribble graffiti on your friend’s “wall”, you can “poke” or “comment” on your friend’s “status”. The keyboard messages become a medium of communication with people whom you have never seen. You never hear their voice. The messages become the voice of the person. You never see their face except for the picture that they might or might not put up as their profile picture. You don’t share the same geography. The person could be sitting next door to you or in Timbuktu. Distances…Geographical don’t matter. Often times you are left wondering whether you have chosen well. In these times of cyber crime, there comes a point when you wonder whether it is really safe to trust these people who arrive into your life via bits and bytes.
The fingers on the keyboard clattering away inane or useful messages to people in far-flung corners of the globe is the exercise that increasing number of computer users are getting if we talk of exercise. The mind however has never been exercised to the extent it’s being asked to do now and it seems to be getting more alert to pick up the right kind of vibrations, vibrations that resonate with you through words which are printed on an interface medium. In fact the five senses are losing to the sixth sense which is the most alert and ever ticking, picking out the people who you want to connect with and for what reason.
So, in reality are we seeing a paradigm shift in the way inter-personal relationships are evolving? There certainly is a paradigm shift in the way people look at change. Earlier there was resistance to change. People needed stability and predictability in all spheres of engagement. Today…the only constant thing is change. We change our jobs, our mobiles, our computers, our homes…in short everything. We even look forward to the change and get irritable if that change doesn’t come quickly enough. The same holds for relationships too. Relationships are being redefined and rewritten in these times of flux.
Lastly…will these virtual friends be there when you need them the most or are the good old person to person engagements more enduring. We will have to wait and watch. In the meantime, I wonder what the next big thing after twitter is going to be.
Shalini Puthiyedam is an engineer, NGO volunteer, teacher, French linguist, amateur singer, home maker and a world citizen who has aspirations for a just and equal world. You may wanna follow her @shalinipv
I am alarmed and I believe my reason to be alarmed is on a strong footing.
Sociologists would have us believe that Man is essentially a social animal. That we tend to like being in herds. That we enjoy more in the company of others. How much of this is true?
Nowadays, in any urban area, we see only a neighbourhood of strangers. Be it a flat or a posh enclave or any other walled community, rarely do the neighbours know each other. Gone are the days when we had neighbours coming over to chat over a cup of tea. Nowadays they do come over, if and only if they require something. We simply cannot drop in without advance intimation. It’s considered rude. If our neighbor behaves rudely if we just walk in, he is well within his
right!!
Athithi devo bhava??? Not anymore. Some wise man said that
Fish and Guests smell after three days. Nowadays people despise guests who stay for couple of hours. We don’t have the time. Either we are busy with work or we are busy teaching our children or we have our favourite TV Show to watch.
We derive comfort in the company of computers. We would rather playing games on the computer than deal a deck of cards with our neighbour. We are comfortable sitting in the privacy of our office or home to chat away to glory, to advise, to comfort, to sympathise, to empathise, to condemn, to attack vehemently to do practically whatever we wish to do or rather what we can do with the click of the mouse or a few taps on the keyboard. We prefer this selective anonymity to the direct interaction with other human beings.
Are we becoming a world of introverts and perverts? We don’t see evil acts as just that – plain evil. Some quirk in human nature allows even the most unspeakable acts of evil to become banal within minutes, provided that they occur far away enough to pose no personal threat. So we have jokes about Michael Jackson and what happens when he is
around kids. We dont care about Koda’s Kodis. Are we trivializing everything with a stoic indifference provided they always happen to someone else? Why are we deriving
comfort in impersonal non-human company to the exclusion of fellow human beings?
We are educated, armed with lot of information, loads of talent,
poised to attain well-being yet as if with seeming deliberation we
tread the path towards catastrophe, create chaos instead of order, suffer nervous break downs instead of becoming stable, embrace, drugs, death and destruction instead of love, life and light. Why so? We all have free will, yet when we act its as if we are on a leash. We have the freedom to move, yet it’s within the limits of the leash but not beyond. Its as if there are invisible preordained parameters defined by the computer, curbing and curtailing our movement.
Strangely we complain of loneliness and depression while exhibiting a paranoidal unwillingness to socialize. We seek solace by hitting the bottle or clicking the knitting needles. Yet we simply don’t have the time to make everyday courtesies.
We become socially awkward imbeciles by confining our emotions to emoticons. Social functions seem no more appealing and we tend to make excuses to avoid attending them. We have time to chat with our unknown admirers and friends, but have no time for our spouse or kid. We crave for attention on the web while ignoring what is readily within our reach in the comforts of our social environs. Internet has become the most addictive drug making people watch the screen expectantly,bleary eyed, expecting a poke or a comment or a status update.
To my mind, the more comfort we find in the virtual world, the far removed from reality we become. Ultimately our requirements would be more in the real world for which we would need real people who can spend real time for us.
We have perfected the art of ignoring the one voice, which if allowed to speak, will unhesitantly do so, without any heed to our thoughts. The voice of our inner conscience. We don’t hear it advicing us to go out and socialise, over the din of our mundane existence, rather we conveniently drown it with whatever we can, preventing its feeble attempts of regurgitating protests –perhaps with a shot of tequila or a snort of coke, or those walkman ear plugs clamped firmly – all the while blaming our loneliness and depression on everyone but us. We continue to wallow in our loneliness- a loneliness brought about by our dependency on the virtual world. Is this our Nemesis catching up on us?
Wow! 787 words!! Such a nice, punchy comment. The next time you comment on Shalini’s work, I’m gonna publish it as a separate post and link to Shalini’s. You rock!!!
I concur. Sometime ago, I wrote an article “Going cyber at a young age – Where’s the world heading to?“. I think it’s just the starting point for all evil…becoming introverts and then perverts. Phew!
I’ve already said before and I think I will say it again. This comment is a stand-alone piece and as @ubiquitense put it, it will be a separate piece the next time on. Thanks Ajayan.
Awesome blog on the pre-internet generation. Keep bloggin.
Thank you Sherline. I hope you will continue reading.
OH SO true.as much you needed these virtual friends you needed the real world too! But then it is not too bad too!twitter teaches you that you need to ‘follow’ right people(so does life).so by these analogies and several others i can prove that a pointless online life is not as fatal as a stupid/meaningless real life! i mean you waste stuff on drinks and smokes!!how is that?but then people do become different! once they used to speak loads to you about their life and stuff,now they are always less that 14ocharacters! anyways.some people find it hard with verbal communication ,for such people i think internet is the most beneficial!at the same time it is harming them too..someday it will backfire!because real interview is not a google chat!!
I think the point that kids use internet more than they should be (they shouldn’t be using IMHO) is acceptable!!
At the same time i don’t see only the ‘lesser’ side of internet networking ..being wise in choosing friends (and followers
) is a different issue altogether! if you hadn’t socialised physically you wouldn’t have known NOT to trust the Less trustworthy!So In my opinion you need to be in a REAL world if you need to be in this online world!other way round is not so mandatory!
emoticons…..well i don’t see a problem…words are not the only way through which you transmit emotions…i have found people who are going through problems,who want people to tell them ‘its gonna be fine’ ..so these small things don’t make you introvert or something!
take my case i dint know many people in my college..like my seniors and so on…i should tell you that i am not so comfortable ‘socially’..as in i take lots of time to talk to someone..(my reasons..
) ..but once i started blogging/tweeting i met them ONLINE..and offline didn’t take me a large time to know them…so you get the point..
Of course you end up being a @mr.human if you dont take care of the people around you..i mean standing around your PC..
Thanks for your comment! This is a hot topic by itself, and Shalini has presented this in her own delectable style.
Well, at the end of the day, everything is through your perspective… nowadays, people meet on Facebook and Orkut, and marry. One cannot judge the other person’s wavelength just by chatting with him/her on gchat or yahoo. It might be a rosy picture initially, but only when one gets to see him/her personally, he/she can form/confirm an opinion. What to say..it appears simple, but it’s complicated at times. Social networking, huh!
Your @Mr. Human, @mr.human-on the job, @mr.human-Jab they met, and @mr.human–a sip of tea, give a poetic view of the virtual world.
Hi Naren.
I seem to inspire people to write a mini-blog as a response.
Not to say I’m complaining. Its just great that so many people think about what I’ve written and feel so strongly about it that they indulge in this level of penmanship themselves.
Of course i do think that the virtual friendships at some point need to become real and that is what generally happens. You find a way to meet up with those that you sync with.
Do hope to see you sometime.
Yes, as I used to tell you…you continue to inspire people VIRTUALLY! Just like the cartoon that I doodled for this post, we shall meet soon
Lolz!!
Hey
And the doodles were just right.
. Thnx. And yes… We will meet very soon indeed. 
It is true that anything in moderation is fine. However,the problem with addiction is that no body starts anything with the intention of becoming addicted.The addict often becomes so obsessed with the thought that “only weak individuals become addicts” so much so that he or she will exhaust money , ruin a marriage and family life, and lose a career before admitting to addiction. The addiction can be to anything from the most dangerous drugs to the seemingly harmless sinful choclate, delicious icecreams, tasty potato chips, the finger licking good KFC, or the internet. In fact it is not that weak individuals become addicts, but addicts become weak individuals. This is true more of the present generation who would rather live “second life” than be out socialising in the real world. Lets face it, given an option, kids nowadays would be happy sitting in front of the computer or TV playing video games than going out and kicking a football. We should not delude ourselves that its all part of the “evolutionary progress”, rather its highly detrimental to their physical as well as mental well being . I dont know whether I had said this before, I know of an instance when a friend’s child was taken to the neurologist for uncontrollable tics that he was suffering from and it was diagonised to be due to playing on the PSP. Interestingly when the furious parents were planning to sue, the doc himself told them to go through the gaming manual carefully and to their shock and surprise, there was a disclaimer covering such an eventuality.
Lets not evade reality, lets face it, the issue is much more serious with the present tech savvy internet generation than the pre-internet generation.
ok someone replied to some post saying @naren…was it referring to ‘this’ naren’ or you know HIM naren!
Kidding..i get excited to see my links..i can debate forever if you know links to my posts are put under every line..(phew….exact reactions from my antaratmaa
)
anyways it definitely makes us dumb..i strongly believe..!how much of HARM it does..well i will have to RETHINK (RT..:P)
An article well written & debated.
Isn’t it all a part of the evolutionary process humans are undergoing from the times unknown. He found fire, wheel and now computers & internet. What next ??
Hey there.
Thanks for the comment. Yeah the only thing that’s constant now is only change. Yes…there’s been a healthy debate too on this topic. Please continue to read. Shall try to keep writing.
Nice build-up of the article!
And yes you are right, the Internet is changing relationships like anything.
Also got the bit about the woman’s perspective.
Am bookmarking your blog.
Cheers!
Hi Sunil.
Thank you for taking time off to read my piece. And thanks for the bookmark too.
Consider it a privilege.
Hi Shalini,
I really like the title and your emphasis on keeping realtionships non-virtual…
Conincidently i was also reading a paper on virtualization as a technology…which is technical however:)
Social networking sites are used by some people to connect to strangers, while some people connect only to those they know from school or college or workplace…Friendship gets superficial anyways after school…it starts from college and then to work days, friends are there to just have fun, go out, chat and just hang around. Relationships are virtual in a real world after some point of time even without the Internet:) True friends are few and rare and they dont anyway need social networking sites…so from my point..these sites are the best platform for people who do just casual talk or connect to grow business etc….when it is emotional stuff let it be real…this difference is subtle and people who understand this can be real and virtual at the same time…
Thanks
Sulakshana
I really dunno that I put such emphasis on making relationships non-virtual. Maybe the wish is there…but more and more I feel that we remain in that virtual space for lack of time, or geographical limitations or whatever.
I am not sure that we strike up relationships on the net because we want casual talk. It isn’t so atleast for me. And as I see it going…my friendships like it is with you too is very much virtual.
My endeavour is to meet the most people I can with diverse views who can enrich my view of the world and in turn be in some way a meaningful part of their lives. I do think there is so much to learn from people out there and I for one do not network socially just to be among the butterflies. 
.
Much as I would like to meet in person all the wonderful people I get to know online…I do not think its truly possible. And as you said sometimes…after a point real engagements also become somewhat virtual.
Thanks for peeking in. Please continue to read and comment. Your feedback is very valued.
Dear Shalini,
Sorry for commenting on this post, a little delayed. I am on vacation, sorry, on a driving spree… Vacation or Occupation?
The article is well written. I could visualise each and every word on this post. The attitudes of the younger and older generations, the generation gaps etc. etc.
It was, of course, a thought provoking one.
Best Regards,
Renjith