Dear (Insert your name here),
Nowadays, social mediums such as Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr have taken away our voice and minimized our ability to interact with human beings on a physical level. By ‘physical level’ I’m not talking about sex or anything promiscuous.
I’m talking about the girl next to you who has her head down flipping through her touch-screen phone, pressing “like” on everyone’s status and pictures.
“What do you mean?” you’re probably wondering. Or probably not since you’re so preoccupied with checking how many notifications you’ve received today instead of reading this.
What I mean is we, as a society are all turning into “social introverts.” We blog, “like” and use acronyms such as “gpoy” to extort who we are onto these social mediums that store all of our information. We’re too lazy to explain who we actually are in person so we use social media as an outlet to connect to people.
While Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter have provided us with an easy way to keep in touch with our so-called “friends” I want you to ask yourself: How many friends do you actually have?
How many of these Facebook “friends” do you actually care about? Probably not that many, right? Nowadays, instead of hanging out with friends people prefer to like their statuses in order to remind them that you still care. It’s practically the same thing right?
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The truth is we are all guilty of it. Yet unlike the Titanic, it’s definitely not too late and we can be saved.
So you – yes, you! – stop manipulating your life to fit these “social mediums”… ugh, don’t even try to deny it. How many times have you thought in your head “O.M.G., this would make such a great profile picture!” or “O.M.G., this is going on my Twitter!” Please just stop.
You can call me rude but maybe the next time I want to get to know someone, I’ll just go check his or her timeline on Facebook. I mean, that’s what this is all about right? These mediums have caused us to lose touch with our social skills and replaced them with incentives such as who can look the coolest on the internet, who parties the hardest and whoever doesn’t have a Facebook probably doesn’t really exist, right?
Wrong. Being recognized and liked on the Internet versus real life are two different entities.
For the past eight months I deleted my Facebook and in doing so, I lost contact with half of the people I regularly talk to. I realized that without Facebook my “friends” and I do not put a lot of effort into actually trying to keep in touch. One of my self-proclaimed close friends on Facebook thought I had transferred to another school! And although my phone number remained the same, my absence on Facebook has caused my online social networking presence to become obsolete. Yet on the contrary, my physical relationship with others has dramatically improved. After being absent from Facebook for eight months, I reactivated my account only to find people greeting me with posts such as “You’re alive!” and “Where have you been?”
Well, the truth is that I’m right here. I’m the girl sitting next to you (invisibly), watching you scroll through your phone tweeting about how much your life sucks instead of actually living it. Maybe back in the day there was a reason why it was called a yearbook and it was used once a year instead of everyday.
However, the situation remains the same: the online social networking platforms are slowly, but surely, killing the physical being inside of us.
So on behalf of all the people who aren’t as socially outgoing online and the not-so-tech-savvy people out there, please just put down your Androids, iPhones, and iPads and get in touch with reality.
Get up and actually go hang out with all of these people you supposedly “miss” and show the world you don’t need the internet to be the social being that you are.
P.S: Remember it’s “love thy neighbor” not Facebook thy neighbor.