3. Technology and Social Interaction

I was recently reading a New York Times article entitled “Feel Like a Wallflower? Maybe It’s Your Facebook Wall.” The author of the article, Jenna Wortham, begins with a narrative in which she is sitting alone in her house about to begin a quiet night of movie watching when her phone suddenly began to buzz with alerts from her social networking sites where she was able to view pictures and read stories of her friends activities for the night immediately as they happened. Next Jenna introduces the idea of “FOMO” or the fear of missing out. It is a feeling that I for one know I have experienced, and I am sure if you are reading this blog you have social networking sites, and therefore also experience FOMO. Social Networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare give the user the ability to post minute-to-minute information on there whereabouts including the ability to post pictures to your page so that people across the world are able to see what you are doing, literally as it happens. The author splits the concept of FOMO into two categories in which I will also do to discuss the effects of technology on social interaction, the good and the bad.

The Good: In such a growing and ever-expanding world as it seems today it is not common to be across the country, or even across the globe from your friends and family. Travelling abroad is an experience that many of my junior friends took this year and one of the only means I had of communicating with them or seeing what they were up to was by checking their Facebooks. I was able to see pictures of the trips they had taken, see the status with the lingo from their new homes, and read stories that they had posted on each other’s walls. While I did not understand most of what they were saying, this did make me feel closer to them.

The Bad: As the New Yorker article states: “occasionally, there is a darker side. When we scroll through pictures and status updates, the worry that tugs at the corners of our minds is set off by the fear of regret… we become afraid that we’ve made the wrong decision about how to spend our time.” This feeling of missing out or making the wrong decisions can change the social interactions that we have on a day to day basis and often times create tension or resentment among friends. One feature of Facebook that I find especially interesting on this topic is the fact that you can “defriend” someone. While some people try to weed out their connections of people they may not know others can find resentment in this.

The line that stuck out to me most in the article was made by Sherry Turkle, when she says, “In a way, there’s an immaturity to our relationship with technology. It’s still evolving.” I think there is a lot of truth to this statement because in a lot of ways we do not understand how to respond with normal emotions to what we see on other’s social networking sites. For example if a friend was to come back from her weekend and tell you how much fun she had with her boyfriend or other friends, your first reaction would most likely be excitement and joy for her for having had a positive experience, where as if you were to see the pictures from the weekend appear on her Facebook before you had heard any stories you are often unsure of how to act. Why did she not tell me she was going? Who did she go with? And thus the resentment begins to build. The struggle that humans face is not in finding the new technologies but in how to deal with them and begin to react maturely to situations such as this. I do believe that social networking sites have both pros and cons to them. I do not think that the solution is to find more places for people to meet face-to-face because I think in order to keep up with society we need to learn how to evolve with the technology. I definitely believe that keeping human interaction in critical especially in the business world, but we must also realize that this technology is unavoidable.