Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Digressing from Facebook back the 'Old Fashioned' blog

I think the use of social media is astounding. It's endlessly amazing to me how I can click around Facebook and see photos and details about the life of someone from India or Australia. I think the fact that it has become so common place to use social media to stay connected is a positive thing for society....in theory.

Twitter and Facebook have become commonly used verbs. People 'check in' at Loews and Wal-Mart. Teenagers bully their peers on each others 'walls'. There are clear downsides to having a virtual world to play in.

You log in to Facebook and are bombarded with advertisements based on photos you've uploaded, movies you have mentioned. The amount of data about you sitting on their servers is mind blowing.

To me, though, all of this is just the price of technology. They are all simply tweaks to life that we have to adjust to as the world around us changes and moves more and more virtual.

What I am not okay with is the rapid move away from true and meaningful communication. To look at it from the most extreme perspective, writing in cursive is becoming a lost art. People don't hand write letters or even notes during classes or meetings any longer. With the flood of increasingly abbreviated communication avenues, even the idea of sitting down to type out a well worded and fully formed thought is becoming more distant. As a society our ability to write, even type correctly, use our language to it's fullest and most eloquent extent and ultimately truly connect with one another is fading.

I'm just as guilty as the next of falling prey to this 'easy and quick' mentality. For the past year, rather than taking the time to formulate my thoughts or stories of my travels into intelligent paragraphs I've been distilling them into one liners with a photo taken on a mobile device to post on Facebook.

I don't usually make New Year's resolutions, however this year I think one is necessary. I'm going to commit to myself to go back to using this space to document (and share if anyone cares) my life, my thoughts, my rants, my photos and even my one liner quotes etc.

Let's see how I do...

1 comment:

MJ said...

Love it! You are reading my thoughts.