It concerns me that people around me are becoming more and more dependant on social media.
Time moves on I get that, and this is how we communicate now but the ability to message folk wherever they are isn’t necessarily a healthy thing to me.
I have a smart phone and my kids use it to contact me but they sort of know that they won’t always get an immediate reply.
Gill sends me a message or two through the day but has said she knows that it’s more like a post-it on a notice board than a brick with a letter wrapped round it.
However, people younger than me (and there are a lot of them) seem to need a constancy of contact with their peers.
All day I overhear conversations along the lines of “Hi, yeah, I’m shopping, then I’m getting the bus home.” Or “where are you, Babes? ”
To me most of these are pointless other than to satisfy a craving for human contact.
Before mobile phones we made an agreement to meet and rarely spoke after that until we met.
When we were out and about we seldom phoned home (usually from a telephone box) and would just arrive.
Where possible we would say ” I’ll be home by 4″ or “be home for dinner” and this provided a rigidity to life which may soon fade.
Life now is flexible as we constantly update folk with messages, texts and GPS phone apps.
Another aspect of this dependency is the cloying interlinking of lives and concerns.
We don’t have to take responsibility for our actions anymore nor do we have to make decisions on our own.
We have a host of people we can ask for advice, and ultimately blame when things go wrong.
One thing I don’t agree with is the idea that smart phones have caused a decline in general knowledge.
No they haven’t.
There are, and always have been, a majority of people who have little or no general knowledge outside of who did what in their favourite soap opera or what that woman at no.22 has been up to.
Intelligence and knowledge don’t always go hand in had. I know a few quiz masters who have incredible factual recall but are actually as “dumb as a bag of hammers”. I also know allegedly intelligent people who can’t remember phone numbers or the wife’s birthday. One of the former leans heavily on his factual knowledge when he talks to me in a wasted attempt to feign intelligence.
All in all I’m more concerned about the emotional dependency on others that these little machines are creating.
* Just had a quick chat with the eldest before she went to college and she agrees. Her peers wander the halls tapping away and customers on her Saturday job will halt transactions to take a call which she can hear is just a social chat.
