Being Together and Staying Together

Before the advent of cutting-edge technology, people did not require a social network to call themselves social.

We used to live as a family, not of three or four but of thirty or forty. Larger numbers did induce quarrels and bickering but the entire family behaved as a single unit guided by the elders.

As mentioned in the holy bible: “Love thy neighbor as thyself”, earlier people interacted with neighbors much more even if they did not live next door.

In today’s scenario, especially the housing complexes even if people live as next-door neighbors they rarely interact and even look and smile at each other.

Human beings are social animals and we are all meant to act as a unit because whatever we achieve alone, together we can always achieve more! But nowadays, with daily advancement in technology—headphones, laptops, smartphones, and applications attract most of us and we forget about the basics of living in a society.

People have forgotten that indulging and enjoying music is not just plugging in a headphone throughout the day, interacting with people is not just texting them via WhatsApp and updating status and posting photos on Facebook is not at all being social.

People are busy maintaining their online connection that they are not dedicating enough time or effort to cultivating deeper real-life relationships. Our real and virtual worlds certainly overlap, as many of our virtual friends are also our real friends.

But the time and effort we put into our virtual worlds limit the time to connect and especially to communicate on a deeper level in our real world.

While we may have hundreds of Facebook friends, some of them we would never have met otherwise, with whom we can share many new things but do they really provide the kind of human interaction that is so essential to our emotional health?

We need to examine our technology use to ensure that it isn’t getting in the way of our being sociable and getting the emotional support we need from the people who are closest to us.

With mobile devices and social media, email, texting, Skype, and other communication apps, our socialization culture is undergoing major changes, not necessarily for the good. We are no longer dependent on location or time to socialize in the digital world. We no longer have to take the time or effort to physically.

We no longer have to take the time or effort to physically meet up face-to-face to socialize. We can do it anywhere at any time. The geography and time of socialization are now limitless. And since such digital socialization can so conveniently satisfy our hard-wired desire to socialize, it is replacing our socialization in the physical world.

The culture of socialization is changing and the challenge is sure to continually go up in the future.

Suggested Read: Are You Really Happy