Our society is scarily reliant on technology. It supports and enables our everyday lives in ways we may not even notice. With this reliance comes the now prominent way of socializing — through the Internet. What’s started as a teen phenomenon in MySpace has grown into a whole industry of networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and the recent eruption of Twitter. It’s so huge that, perhaps even more scarily, our parents are joining and adding us as friends on Facebook.
But what fuels this interest? Why do we have such an addiction to our online personalities which may or may not be accurate reflections of who we are?
It just might be because we love the attention. Surprising, I know. People love attention. They might say they’re on Facebook to keep up with old friends, but they’re also there to be looked at, studied, stalked by and, in the end, judged by other people. Evidence of this lies in the fact that digital photography is now synonymous with “tagging” people in photos.
Go ahead and admit it. Every time you’re on vacation or at a party and someone snaps you in that picture, the image is going to be posted online in a few days. Before the picture is taken, the thought crosses your mind as to whether you look good or not because you know it’s going to be on Facebook. You even heckle the camera person about it by asking, “When are you going to post those pics on Facebook?!” You know exactly what I’m talking about. But it’s just natural. As humans, to some extent, we all want to be seen, and we all want to be heard.
But the heard part has taken an interesting new form, no ears necessary. The keyboard and monitor have taken the place of verbal communication and auditory recognition. Facebook statuses and Twitter let us advertise to the world what we’re doing and how we’re feeling. Celebrities, as if they don’t have enough attention, made Twitter popular by constantly updating what they’re doing in a given day, keeping all of us on our toes as to what Soulja Boy Tell ’Em ate or Blink 182 bassist Mark Hoppus forgot. For some reason, we think people care enough to let everybody know we’re going to the gym or that we hate finance class. Yet we still do it. People may not care, but they will almost certainly read anyway.
The phrase Twitter uses for keeping up with someone is “follow.” It’s kind of like virtual people watching. If it’s not our obsession with ourselves, maybe society’s online fascination with people is the manifestation of curiosity about what other people do.
What we “do” is a statement that sort of defines who an individual is as a person. We want to follow the lives of others and want others to follow our lives, which goes back to attention. It’s just more convenient to follow behind a computer screen than to take the effort to actually interact with someone in person.
Face-to-face or telephone contact has taken a back seat to the comment, message or tweet. If someone is constantly updating their profile as to how or what they’re doing, nobody needs to ask, do they? Of course, not everybody is quite important enough to call and just talk to. In fact, in a lot of cases, that might be kind of awkward. A wall post seems to get the job done as far as a, “Hey! Thought of you today. Let’s hang out over the summer!” goes. After all, we need to keep in touch with all 4,726 friends in 46 states that we know personally.
That sense of popularity we get from all of our friends online might help fuel the craze as well as our egos. Being on someone’s top friends on MySpace is a big deal because it makes us look important. We also have control over how those friends perceive us based off the way our profiles are organized and displayed. It allows people to mask insecurities, in some ways less obvious than others (i.e. the MySpace whores who only take pictures from a certain particularly flattering angle that grossly exaggerates how attractive they actually are) and serve as a self-confidence booster. Anything that makes us feel better about ourselves easily becomes addicting.
The habit of online socialization has become the norm for even older generations. Though convenient and even entertaining, networking sites take away from the experience of actually having strong and healthy relationships. But with today’s society, it’s just easier to click a mouse.
In fact, it’s about time for a status update.
— Oliver Casey is a junior in enterprise management. He can be reached at [email protected].
