People say that with all the recent technology like Facebook and Twitter that we are becoming more fractionalized as a society. Which, interestingly enough, is the opposite of what sites like those sites originally intended. I am not sure if that is true, but what is true is that it is fracturing us from our own emotions.
It is not that I look to Hollywood celebrities as pillars of emotional stability, but some were slightly exposed after the recent death of young actress Brittany Murphy. Many tweeted about how ‘God needed an angel’ or however need to justify an untimely passing. But others like Denise Richards’ first thought was to mention the movie title that they both stared in to qualify her own grief. Audrina Partridge from MTV The Hills fame showed her grief with a sad face emoticon. (Tweets posted at bottom)
But what struck me the deepest about the distancing of emotions that people are doing through texting and typing, where you do not have to look into another human’s face to gauge their actual grief, was a mother in Merritt Island, Florida who tweeted about her two year old son’s drowning death in between her 911 call and the time paramedics arrived. “Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool.” I do not to pretend to understand what a mother is going through when she is in crisis mode of losing a child, but I can guess that her Twittering about it helped distance herself from the horror. And perhaps she was looking for comfort or an escape route from any one of the 5,400 strangers she collected but maybe that time would have been better spent consoling her other three children who will have to deal with this death for the rest of their lives and forever knowing that mommy typed to strangers instead of talking with them face to face.
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I think this has become the age of Narcissism. Everyone is suffering from I-need-my-five-minutes-of-fame-itis. I’m 36 and I feel like an old fogey with this but I don’t get the point. Sometimes I want to buy a bullhorn, head over to the Empire State building observatory and scream – “People – no one cares about your silly little lives. Including mine.”. These technologies are free to use but funded by hundreds of millions of dollars in investor backing not because of the wonderful way it brings us together, but because it gives advertisers a great research pool on human behavior. Want to know where 25 year olds like to eat in Manhattan, on a Friday, when it’s raining? Do some data mining and you’ll find out. This is not conspiracy theory – it’s a fact. Social networking is a great way to expose the behavior of people, segmented by geography, age, gender, race, income bracket etc.
Ok. I’m done.
-Sherman