Communication is Key
Posted by Jakstone | Filed under Friend 2.0
In a society where communication is everything, why is it that we as society seem to be distancing our selves more from each other? With the advent of text messaging, phone calls, emails, instant messaging, and new methods of communication like Twitter, Facebook, and Google Wave you would suspect that we would be drawn closer together as a community.
These tools have created a side affect that no one could have ever suspected. We email instead of speaking on the phone, 45% of people now break up through text messages, and 32% of people admit they have flirted with someone else through text messaging while on a date with someone else. What does this all about how we now choose to communicate?
As the flow of everyday information becomes more predominate and easier to access, we are becoming our own gate keepers to our digital lives. We pick and choose who is allowed become our friends, who can see our updates and even how we choose for people to view and interact with us, all with no remorse or consequence. We have become the stars of our own digital world weaving through social networks and profiles trying to gain attention from a world over loaded with irrelevant information. Fame comes in many forms in the meta both good and bad. It can become a venue to catapult you to the next level or become the platform where you are the next global joke that will forever live in the meta.
These new tools for communication should be used to enhance your real life and to expand your network on a global scale. But most people have started to use the meta as a defensive structure from which they shield themselves from real life situation and allowing them to experiment with different type of relationships with out any consequence. This has led to a the creation new personas, an online presents that doesn’t necessarily represent who they would be in the real world.
In one form or another this new entity that is born within the meta is an extension of that person. Somehow this new persona is fulfilling a need that the person cannot fulfill within their real life.
We should all learn about our online personas and understand why it persists and how it interacts with and affects our real lives. Maybe in doing this we can bring some of that knowledge and self discovery back into our real lives to better ourselves.
Maybe in the end we will be able to just talk to a person face-to-face about an issue instead of sending a text message.
