Why I Used to Live in 1998,

even when it was 2008.

On the occasion of me joining Facebook and recently getting my first American cell-phone, I thought it would be a good idea to restart up another form of social media- my blog. I'll have to think of a new name, but I think about that later.

So anyways, on the occasion of me getting Facebook, here is something I wrote a while back about all the reasons that I can be a Facebook hater.

I hope this isn't too vindictive, but just remember, there is a reason that I am on Facebook now, and that is that it also offers lots of cool/useful functions. So useful that every business and NGO nowadas has to have one.

"WHY I’M LIVING IN 1998

I live-happily-without either a cell phone or a facebook account. I will grant that both of these things have definite positives that no one can deny, but the longer I spend without these conveniences and the smaller the minority of college students without them becomes, the more I become convinced that they are having very serious, and negative, social effects that we have failed to notice.

A lot of my views on communication were formed during my semester abroad in Ecuador. While in Ecuador, I watched as friends of mine seemingly spent their life waiting in anticipation for the next email or facebook message from home. After the brief period of joy that apparently always accompanies the message, “Hey Lucy! Was thinking of you! Hope everything is going great!” my friends were forced to go back to **gasp** the real world.

My American friends in Ecuador were maddeningly obsessed with facebook. To me, this long distance communication was basically substanceless, like cotton-candy, as Staley lecturer Shane Hipps called it. More importantly, this substanceless communication had the tendency to pluck ones thoughts away from the present and into the past. It felt like the ease of this long distance communication was taking away from our experience in Ecuador. It was way too easy (even for me) to, in effect, stay at home, rather than engaging in what was right before our eyes: Ecuador and our new group of friends-two things for which, even without the distraction of facebook, one semester was not nearly enough time.

Far more troubling, however, than the way in which facebook and cell phones can keep us insulated from a challenging world, is the insecurity that I think rampant use of facebook and cell phones can create. I have come to the conclusion that extreme use of cell phones and facebook is an indication of, and an ineffectual stopgap for, our own insecurity.

Maybe it is just that I value my time alone more than other people, but when I constantly see people walking to and from class on their cell phones, texting in class, and basically filling up any downtime with their cell phones, it makes me wonder if we all have just become afraid to be alone.

Along with other emotions (like sadness and discontentment) I think our society is teaching us that being alone and bored is simply not acceptable. If you are feeling alone, you must be a loser and not have any friends. You have to have your cell phone at the ready to prove to yourself that, should things not be super exciting where you are, a friend of yours is there to keep you company. We end up living our lives trying to figure out where we could be having the most fun or being the most productive instead of making the most of our current situation.

Egregious use of cell phones also reveals insecurity in our friendships. Why do parents buy their high-school kids cell-phones: because they don’t trust them and want to be able to keep tabs on them. Now I know most of you aren’t calling your friends or significant others because you don’t trust them, but this aspect of keeping tabs is defiantly there.

Constantly checking up to see “what’s going on,” sounds a lot to me like, “you’re not doing anything without me are you?” As if friends doing something without you means you are suddenly not friends. It is simply not true. I think true friendships would allow space for our friends to fully engage in their current surroundings.
Maybe without cell phones we would all be a little bit better at making new friends, or simply enjoying the company of strangers. Texting, short phone calls, and most certainly facebook surfing can be a fruitless way of hiding our insecurity from ourselves.

I know cell phones and facebook are not going away, and one day I myself might find myself with one or both. However, I think we should all take a moment to make sure that these new technologies are not, in fact, hindering our social interactions by limiting our ability to engage our present surroundings and fostering insecurity in our relationships."