Eric Yust
Special to In Motion
Communication is key. We’ve all heard the maxim, and it holds true in everything from relationships to business to banal day-to-day activities we never think twice about.
Without communication we are absent in a world that relies upon us relying on one another. Communication, conversation and correspondence moved us out of caves and into an environment where we could share where the best watering hole was or the largest herd to hunt.
Over time, we used this much-needed gift to our advantage and built civilizations and societies. We solved world problems and created some in the process. Communication is something, as humans, that we thrive upon. It’s connection. It’s a need to be wanted and heard. It’s expression. Art at its basic, most natural form.
Sans communication we have naught. We’d be a planet of mimes with mouths sewn shut and hands tied behind our backs. Only recently, within the past 15 years, have we embarked upon a new way of expression and exchange of information — the Internet.
The advent of this technological marvel of modernism eventually gave birth to social media, which has eternally altered humanity. Is it for the better though?
Social media has penetrated our society. As we all know firsthand, it is everywhere. Social media and networking, however, have exposed our addiction to technology. Our need on a minute-to-minute basis to be adored and accepted by a false friend. A name on a screen. A ghost in the machine who we’ve never met and probably never will.
We itch for friends on Facebook and long for “Likes” on Instagram. Are these truly our “friends?” Flesh and blood brethren that would stand by us in the worst of times or just fair-weather followers that would drop us from a list at the first sign of high waters?
Many, of course, seek out strangers from a distance for companionship, to feel less lonely. But as Maria Konnikova points out in her New Yorker article, “How Facebook Makes Us Unhappy,” a 2010 study on Facebook done at Carnegie Mellon found “when participants consumed a lot of content passively, Facebook had the effect of lowering their feelings of connection and increasing their sense of loneliness.”
This is just the relationship side of our problem. Let’s explore the business end of our dilemma. We have all seen posts across social media, both pictures and words, that have gone viral and been mocked for weeks and sometimes months. We even occasionally get the gift of the moron or morons who rob a bank and then proceed to post pictures on Facebook with the mask, money and weapon, under their own names.
Do we ever consider how such Internet gems will affect our future? Granted, most of us aren’t robbing banks, snapping photos and then looking for likes, but most if not all can think of a post we regret. Something archived in the annals of Internet history lying in wait to pop up on the screen of a future employer.
According to an article in Legal Week, “Forty-three percent of employers have admitted that information or photographs they had seen on social networking sites had caused them not to hire a particular candidate.”
Think about that for a second. All your hard work and schooling brought down in an instant by a photo that maybe you took years ago while out with friends one night. A photo that perhaps you viewed as completely innocent, but somehow rubbed a potential future employer the wrong way.
Fair? Probably not, but you’ll never know why you didn’t get that job. Some people provide a day-to-day digital photo scrapbook (with captions) for years and years of their life. On the Internet. For all to see. Forever.
Remember, the Internet is written in pen, not pencil. These are deep, broad pen strokes chiseled into our history eternally… Be careful and mindful of what you post.
It’s easy to argue against this since many positive things have come from social media also. Newfound connections between people who are worlds apart and otherwise would never have access to each other. Business connections that have overcome geographical limitations spanning oceans and continents. Former friendships rekindled that had been lost in time. Inspiration to do better, or more, or even to just do, that has been sparked by a certain post read at a time of need. A funny picture or clever comment that puts a smile on your face and helps you through the day just a bit easier.
And let’s not forget information — news and the status of anything even remotely important or interesting on this planet provided instantly. These are all favorable things in their own right and they support how social media and networking have benefitted society.
Yet, social media is a mixed bag. Does the good outweigh the bad? As our idea of “friends” changes and our society moves forward with its new opium of the masses, only time will tell how we as a civilization will adapt and change to allow social media and networking into our modern human wheelhouse.
Some writers have suggested that future generations will be unable to distinguish between meaningful relationships and casual acquaintances due to the hundreds of people they met once and added as a “friend.” This means we must be cautious on how we proceed. We need to be choosy and more selective on what we share and who we share it with. Not only in our private online selves, but in our public ones as well. If there even is a difference anymore.
To not do so and be unguarded will leave us falling farther and farther down the social media rabbit hole surrounded by false friends who we truly don’t know, and a timeline of our lives, bad decisions and all, following us around like a tin can tied to our leg.