Something I read in this morning’s Straits Times Interactive newspaper (the online version of Singapore’s flagship English paper) caught my attention: A 14-year-old girl who counts her mother, 41, as a friend on Facebook, and who's more comfortable keeping in touch with her through the application than, say, phone calls.
And this happened in Singapore. An island nation that is just a fifth the size of Rhode Island. That threw me.
It seems it’s no longer the case that people are maintaining applications like Facebook because it helps to connect geographically dispersed friends and family. It’s now a way of life, and one of the many modern-day truths of how people are staying connected nowadays.
Forget about bridging geographical distance, because it seems it’s the socio-emotional and psychological distances that people are trying to bridge. Even if it’s a family under one roof.
Language of Connectivity, or Sign of Isolationism?
According to the ST report, Symantec (an IT-security firm) had conducted a study of Facebook habits among some 2,600 children across 12 countries around the world last in 2008, and they found that 25 percent of the children aged seven to 17 (the late Gen Ys and the Gen Zs) actually count their parents among their network.
Dr Carol Balhetchet, a clinical psychologist who was interviewed in the same story, says that a positive to take out of this is the bridging effect that social networks introduce into the family, thereby connecting members who may hitherto be separated due to generational gaps.
In this case, Mrs Seet (the girl’s mother in this story) was the one who first introduced her daughter to the Facebook application, and it’s been a positive experience for both mother and daughter.
However, Dr Balhetchet warns that parents must balance the situation and not lose sight of the face-to-face interaction or else their children may lose an important social life skill due to the isolationism brought about due to the Internet.
As early as 2005, the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society (SIQSS) had already noted that although the Internet had revolutionized the way businesses and communications were taking place in the U.S., it came at a steep social cost.
According to Professor Norman H. Nie, the Director of the SIQSS, a study had showed that people who used the Internet frequently spent as much as 70 minutes less each day interacting with their family, and also slept 25 minutes less.
As a social innovation, it's tremendously enhanced the ability for people to stay in touch, he said. But with every intended positive consequence, there’s also an unintended negative consequence as well.
“The world is more connected than ever before, but people spend less time in person with those they care about.”
Over time, the professor said, the quality of social interactions has been replaced by quantity.
Something to think about...
In one sense, what Professor Nie said is very true.
If we were to look at all the social networking platforms that we’re signed up on, and the total number of contacts or followers we have across these networks, we really need to honestly ask ourselves how many of these can be translated into real relationships offline?
Shouldn’t that be a fundamental of what things ought to be?
Dorie Clark, the CEO of Clark Strategic Communications, recalls the days in 2004 during her involvement as the Director of Communications for Howard Dean’s campaign in New Hampshire and says that in the midst of the campaigning, they were building up a support base involving thousands of supporters online, but they realized they had to have some means of taking those online capital offline, and creating something tangible out of it.
“The goal is really to take people along a spectrum, from being interested and aware, to being active online, and then the culmination is where they are active in the real world,” she says. “And you’ve to find ways to nurture them along each step of the way.”
Even though that was spoken in the context of an online campaign, I think the nugget of truth applies in the normal day-to-day realities of you and me.
As much as we like to have a large ‘fan’ base of friends Facebook, for example, I'm of the opinion that it's more intensely gratifying when both parties can derive something out of the connection instead of just being a link in form only.
Perhaps the best example is seen in Twitter, where people can choose to follow others, and then decide to opt out at a later stage when they feel that the relationship or link isn’t offering them what they’re after.
There must be a mutually beneficial, or tangible, relationship somewhere.
Call me old fashioned, but where children are involved, I feel like Dr Balhetchet do that it must mainly revolve around face time, with additional support from the social networking sites as a complementary factor.
Otherwise, I won’t be able to even contemplate how interaction will be like when my children are born!
Social networking is sometimes like a double edged sword.
For all the good that it does, social isolationism is sometimes the unintended consequence when we fail to keep sight of the fact that what's online often need to be translated into something tangible in the real world.
It's up to us to determine and control which direction we go from this point forward.
What do you think?
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