For years now, the internet has been buzzing about “social media” (which by the way can’t even really be called ‘media’) and how it is supposed to keep us magically more involved in each others lives. This giant shift has pumped up the pageview numbers for many content producers as the baton of usefulness passed from Digg to Facebook and Twitter, which has consequently shown an uptick in advertising revenue for those relying on ad revenue as well as net conversions for products and e-mail lists.
But what happened to the good old fashioned phone call? Has ‘social’ media made us so accustomed to interacting through contextual conversation instead of verbal that we have lost touch with what it means to be genuine and upfront? Recently I have had several people either text or e-mail me in order to give me the less than stellar news. The fact that something didn’t work out had hardly any bearing on my level of being upset at all, it was the impersonal way of telling me that really drove me up a wall. Think about when you schedule an activity with a business and they never both never show up, or call to let you know that there has been a change of plans.
I believe that we are slowly becoming separated by things such as social media, and that being hyper connected contextually makes people feel like it is okay to never have meaningful relationships with the people that they supposedly love to be around. Is it too much to ask for a little common courtesy, real communication and confronting situations these days?
