Spring Break
Opposing Views: MySpace, texting, instant messaging ... is cellular and online socializing making our generation too impersonal?
NO
Briana Hernandez
Issue date: 9/26/07 Section: Opinion
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It's something I can't go a day without seeing. Some indie schmuck or boho-chic poser whining about how technology is becoming the "root of all evil" and how as the world gets wired, the people get colder.
What always gets me laughing is how they plead this case while pulling out a cell phone. Why? Because everyone has one.
Technology, including texting, MySpace and e-mail, is not making the world impersonal.
If anything, it is only maintaining our level of distance from one another. Last time I checked, using the telephone isn't exactly an intimate form of human contact.
How is the ability to message someone on the Web somehow so much worse than talking to them from around the world on the telephone?
I think what people forget about MySpace and other networking sites is that the ultimate objective to "friending" someone online is to eventually meet them in person. This is especially true in the world of online dating.
The era of singles bars, wedding crashing or just plain luck with chance encounters is dead and gone, leaving in its place a more efficient, possibly easier way to meet people.
Now, instead of cruising the scene and trying to find a needle in a haystack, you can cut your time in half by joining a dating site.
While it certainly opens up the pool of potentials, the screening process that comes with assessing a match may give you a better idea of where to start.
But this does not change the fact that even after you find who you're looking for, no amount of technology will be able to aid you on an actual, real-life date. If technology were truly hindering human connection and contact, the bars would be closed and wedding bells would never ring.
Even where technology may be making interaction more impersonal, it is absolutely making it more efficient.
I have a boss whom I have only met three times in the year-and-a-half I have been working for him. Rather than commute an hour to conduct business together, we correspond online. I applied for the job via e-mail. He assessed and hired me via e-mail.
What always gets me laughing is how they plead this case while pulling out a cell phone. Why? Because everyone has one.
Technology, including texting, MySpace and e-mail, is not making the world impersonal.
If anything, it is only maintaining our level of distance from one another. Last time I checked, using the telephone isn't exactly an intimate form of human contact.
How is the ability to message someone on the Web somehow so much worse than talking to them from around the world on the telephone?
I think what people forget about MySpace and other networking sites is that the ultimate objective to "friending" someone online is to eventually meet them in person. This is especially true in the world of online dating.
The era of singles bars, wedding crashing or just plain luck with chance encounters is dead and gone, leaving in its place a more efficient, possibly easier way to meet people.
Now, instead of cruising the scene and trying to find a needle in a haystack, you can cut your time in half by joining a dating site.
While it certainly opens up the pool of potentials, the screening process that comes with assessing a match may give you a better idea of where to start.
But this does not change the fact that even after you find who you're looking for, no amount of technology will be able to aid you on an actual, real-life date. If technology were truly hindering human connection and contact, the bars would be closed and wedding bells would never ring.
Even where technology may be making interaction more impersonal, it is absolutely making it more efficient.
I have a boss whom I have only met three times in the year-and-a-half I have been working for him. Rather than commute an hour to conduct business together, we correspond online. I applied for the job via e-mail. He assessed and hired me via e-mail.
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