Hmmm... I seem to be having some experiences which may be confirming what some studies have hinted at: that too much Net use, perhaps particularly social media, has an unfortunate effect on mood.
I'm pretty sure there is *something* there, the problem is just that logically it does not make sense to me. Just because it's on a screen, why should it be different from letters, or books, or films, or telephone? I would think it's all just different ways of communications, no?
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The problem with social media, is that it is a series of sound and visual bites. Cute cat photo, landscape, flowers, health tips, political messages. All are seen and quickly gone. With a book, magazine article or a movie, even longer blog posts and newspaper articles it requires some effort to process what is happening. I teach university students, and for many of them the idea of sitting down and working through something over several hours is very foreign.
That instant gratification then extends to mood. If someone doesn't get the instant hit then it seems boring and depressing.
Thanks, Ken, that makes a lot of sense.
I've read articles about how everybody's attention span is shorter these days, and it's certainly true for me. Although as to untangle the causes and effects...
Everybody lies on Facebook. Not necessarily in big ways, but people want to make their lives look more glamorous and/or important. "Shiny happy people" as REM said. I started to feel a little bit like I was in "The Truman Show" when I was on Facebook regularly. A short time ago there were some articles about "Premium Mediocre." They expanded on this theme of people building fake lives that look like a TV commercial in hopes that the next job or the next big break will somehow make it all become real.
Thanks.
It´s all so easy today, everything at your fingertips (touch typing would be fine ;-) ) - remember the days when we posted a letter: we w · r · o · t · e it, putting every single letter "into life", stamped it (licking), took it to the GPO (what´s that???), and waited waited waited, for an answer to come, perhaps with an included photo. I remember these times well, I sent so many letters to my English pen-pal, we even exchanged "message tapes" (reel to reel, and later on cassette), man, what a step into the future that was.
Today, my pal and I exchange messages and photos on whatsapp, instantly (!), what a progress, back then we couldn´t even dream of a way to communicate like this. Science fiction at its purest.
There are some abberations when it comes to how to use modern social media, a learning process for many of us, maybe.
At the keyboard, you often feel like a king distributing orders to some invisible servants, or somehow.
Albeit the disadvantages I´d never want to miss fb, twitter, instagram, flickr, blogger, and many more.
...and you know why, my friend.
;-)
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