social media killed my inner communicator.

This recent internet social media revolution has got me thinking about what it must be like to be a kid discovering the internet now.. I was 10 or 11 when I first discovered 56kbps, and it was magical. I remember the first thing I downloaded – ICQ. It took over 30 minutes for a 3mb file, and that felt normal. I remember the first time a banner popped up on my screen stating I was the 1 millionth visitor and I had won a trip to Disney Land, I got excited and told my mom! At that age spam was nothing more than dog food for humans. ICQ was the shit in grade 5, little did we know we were part of a fundamental turning point in communication. ICQ was the birth of instant messaging in my generation, and the parallels to todays technology are astounding. ICQ used a pin system similar to the new BB messenger, it was a 9 digit pin that was impossible to remember, we would hand them around on sticky notes and hope we didn’t lose them on the way home. Looking back.. it was the beginning of the end for personal contact. Instead of hanging out after school playing and having fun, we would rush home so we could chat it up online. I am not saying I regret my childhood because of the internet, but it shaped my personality in more ways than any other factor. I love the internet, and I love social media – but I also have a phobia of making extremely important phone calls, I deny calls from friends and then proceed to txt back asking what they needed. I feel scared without the buffer of being able to wait to hit send.. the ability to think about what you’re saying multiple times before making it fact. Ask any of my friends and they will tell you I can bullshit the best of them, but it doesn’t mean I am not afraid too. I firmly believe that if I wasn’t so dependent on the internet in those early years, I would be a much more confident speaker.

This brings me to my point.. at what age should children be allowed to communicate on the internet? I have a 6-year-old brother that just learned to read the word Cat, but somehow he can google search his favorite show Bakugon without any aid. This isn’t right, this generation will be even more affected than mine. Cell phones were not used for texting until I was in high school, they were used for emergencies, but at the daycare I used to work for, 7 and 8 year olds would ask me for my number so they could txt if they were going to be late. You can’t call me biased either, because I am the first person to jump onto a new social platform (iPhone, Google Wave etc), but I am scared for this generation, and deep down I think I am afraid of what our society may become. Our PC, cell phone, laptop.. these are our surrogates, we hide behind them every day, dreading the time we have to “un-mask” ourselves. Be it meeting’s via webcam, seeing family over Skype, it really is the death of human relationships.

I mean Is a friend on the internet truly a friend? Are they someone who has your back when the kid’s tease you at school? Someone that will be there for you when your life gets tough? Ask yourself that question when you browse your contact list. Try this experiment; Look at your Facebook friend list, count how many of them you have seen in person in the last year, some people could count them on one hand out of hundreds of “friends”. My girlfriend met a girl on MySpace years ago, and they talk to each other daily, she only lives 30 minutes away but they have only seen each other 3 or 4 times in person, and when they do my girlfriend calls the encounters “awkward and weird”, apparently they have nothing to talk about. In reality it’s because that buffer is gone, your no longer looking at a display picture, you’re looking at a real person with all the flaws, and all the human characteristics of a real personality.

Do not get the idea that I have given up on humanity’s capacity to have true emotional relationships, but if we do not act quickly they will diminish, and they have diminished. How can we act? Limit your online activity, even something as simple as asking your friend to go for a coffee when you see them at work or at school is enough. Do not let you children who are at an age of discovery spend hours on the computer, monitor what they are doing, they will get mad, and they will not like you for it, but trust me they will benefit from it. I know I would have.

We are reaching the pinnacle of online social platforms, each one trying to mimic real world confrontations, but at what point did we decide the real thing wasn’t good enough? You can call it irony that it I had to use a blog to convey my emotions on this subject matter, hell you could even say I am an enabler, and although depressing it does show one of the benefits of social media, the ability to share an idea with millions of people simply by pressing publish. Where’s the danger in that?