Food For Thought

I've been looking into different kinds of social networking recently, Twitter being my latest fad, and it's started me thinking about what all these networks actually mean for us as a society. Looking back on the Facebook trend that, for me, started about 18 months ago, it was a novelty. MySpace came before it, but didn't have quite the same impact that Facebook has had. I remember being a little creeped out by the fact that I could stalk everyone's activities - who they spoke to, where they'd been, what they'd been doing, and how they were feeling at the particular moment in time - if they chose to share it with the world, that is.

Now Facebook has become a way of life - well for my generation at least. We plan parties on it, we entertain ourselves at work on it, share photos and basically let it run our lives. It has proved to be a very useful tool for my close group of friends to keep in contact with each other despite the fact that two of us are in different countries at the moment. In a way, it feels like they've never gone.

While, when you think about it, it is a bit weird to be so closely connected with each other's lives - knowing who's doing what, and more importantly, who's doing who, it's not actually all that different from society a few decades ago. We used to live our lives quite openly - people would drop round for cups of tea, women would gossip openly about their neighbours, and there was a real sense of community in neighbourhoods and schools. I don't think you can say that this is true today - we hide behind our front doors and drawn curtains and in our cars, and it's not a rarity to know nothing about your neighbours. In this new society, we choose to interact in other ways - instead of face to face, we sit in front of screens and show a virtual picture of our lives. We're selective about who we interact with, but we're as open as ever... go figure....