How belonging to a large network can actually pull us apart
I remember the gruesome mornings I spent trudging down the halls of Kent Middle School, reminding myself that my battle of fitting in was nothing out of the ordinary. There were cliques, there were nasty girls who were out to make you feel awful about yourself, and there were boys who made you nervous as hell to talk to but you craved their attention just the same. Puberty hit everyone like a ton of bricks.
Thank god that’s over.
But now, nearly a decade later, I still find sparks from those pathetic days through the wonders of Facebook.
Let me explain.
Off the top of your head, can you tell me how many photos you have of yourself? What about the number of albums, or the last Bumper Sticker someone gave you? You can’t tell me that you don’t look forward to receiving a new Wall Post every day (if you’re lucky) just to show anyone who checks that, yes, you’ve made friends at college.
I noticed last week that my total number of friends was a mere 461 people. The creators are pushing us towards another battle for popularity. But who can blame us? We are just individuals in a sea of 30,000 students. If we want any sort of attention we’ve got to make it public. Those who include their new relationship status with their partner’s name know exactly what I’m talking about. Let’s face it, when the going gets rough and you’ve got to get used to the single life again, you hate yourself for ever putting up that information in the first place.
I just want to know what our parents did to feel secure about their success at making legitimate friends in college. How did they let people around the country know that the keg never went dry where they went to school, that they had found true love and a set of close friends? I guess they relied on that ancient artifact called the telephone, but we don’t really use that anymore–we don’t even call it a telephone. Now it’s a cell phone, and we don’t talk–we text.
My mom looks at Facebook as a giant networking circle that enables us to connect with our local communities and keep in touch with our friends around the country.
But Facebook has stunted our generations’ willingness to communicate on a traditional level. I’m talking about calling someone up that you don’t know very well and inviting them over for dinner. Perhaps you’ve dodged the chance to reconnect with an old friend when you cross paths at the mall because the situation seemed too awkward. Because you would only have to click on a few of their pictures to find out all you wanted to know about their life right now.
It disappoints me that I am part of a generation who has access to a limitless base of communication that has caused us to lose the ability to simply talk to each other. If a friend of mine introduces me to someone they’ve known for a while, the two friends still have trouble keeping a conversation going. Their eyes wander and their hands sink into their jacket pockets.
But I can tell that these two actually enjoy each other’s company because of the countless wall posts they wrote to one another claiming that they should “get shitty together this weekend” and that they missed each other so much. But when two friends get the chance to actually spend time together in person, they get nervous and make excuses to cut the meeting short.
We rely too heavily on our typed messages to convey emotions to one another, and our generation has lost the interest and confidence to sit down with someone and really pick their brain to see if they enjoy their company.
We are bright, creative and inviting people who are clearly eager to make new friends at this school, but we have to remember that our Facebook pages are not who we are.
All you have to do is take a leap out of your comfort zone and shut off your computer.
Contact Campus Press Staff Writer Alison Mesinger at Alison.Mesinger@colorado.edu.
