SOCIAL NETWORKING IS ANTISOCIAL

“Exams 2moro, I gotta update my status”… “I’m going on a holiday, need to tweet about it!”… From Twitter to Flicker and Orkut to Facebook everyone is busy updating others about every passing second of their lives. In a time where socializing has come to mean sitting alone with a cup of coffee in front of your pc, ‘meeting’ and ‘talking’ to so called friends, we need to ask ourselves how social is social networking?

People have ridiculous numbers indicating their friends on these websites, while in the world outside their computers, they hardly know anyone. So what do these numbers really indicate? Our social status?



I read in a comic strip once “Don’t say I don’t go anywhere with you anymore, I follow you on twitter all day”! Today going out and spending time with friends is getting replaced by ‘updating status messages’ or ‘tweeting’, while friends are replaced by ‘followers’. Words that wouldn’t have made sense just a few years ago, but have become the new global language that everyone seems to be speaking. People are finding it easier to communicate with people online rather than have a face to face conversation. So is social networking really keeping the world together or is it just helping people creep into their shells and hide behind their ids and status messages?



A friend of mine once told me that people passed by him all day on his birthday and didn’t even wish him. When he asked they said they had “already written on his wall”. Social networking has replaced the interaction between people to messages on their screens. As it tries to replace the real world with the virtual one, one wonders whether it is indeed making us antisocial.