Social Networking

It's been a while since I wrote a web log and I cancelled my Facebook and need another, hopefully more productive, use of my internet time. Why not write about cancelling the Facebooks?! Hey Hey! Makes sense right...? Yeah I didn't think so either.

So I grew up in a time when it seemed like MANY people didn't realize the long term damage that television could do, and everyone (at least everyone around me) watched hours and hours of TV or sat in front of the Nintendo for hours trying to beat Super Mario Brothers. Today we have ten times the TV (meaning there's 10 times the material on TV on hundreds more channels), video games that kick WAY more ass than Mario Bros., and there's the addition of portable computers and internet. I grew up with a screen and I bought into it!

Except now I'm a parent. In my college studies (education major) and internet research into the effects of all this screen time (neurotic first-time parent), I've discovered that it's actually kind of bad for people, and especially children 0-2, to spend time in front of a screen. Any screen. Dammit... I mean I always knew that parking your kid in front of the TV instead of spending time with them was bad parenting, but now there's research that finds statistically significant differences in children that watch tv and children that don't. OK. Since children mimic their parents, I guess I'm going to have allow myself much less screen time than I did prior to being a parent. Got it, and with Sam, my first, I did it. I hardly watch TV at all anymore and I can't remember anytime since he was born where someone asked "Hey did you see the movie ____?!" That I haven't been able to answer "Nope, I'm a parent..."

Well Sam is almost 4 now and we allow MAX 3 hours of screen time a day, and if it gets to that point, we start to feel a little guilty. Usually it's Sunday's when I'm watching football, and if Daddy gets screen time, it's only fair that Sam does too... Right?  Here's the problem though, my daughter Noelle is now 14 weeks(ish) and she can turn her head to the "pretty flashy thing" that we keep in the corner, or to the folding screen that Mommy and Daddy spend a lot of time looking at... and here's where I get into my main theme of this blog, Social Networking.

Since my TV has been commandeered by Barney, The Wiggles,  Fireman Sam, Bob the Builder, Kipper, Lil' Bill, and the Wonder Pets (among others). I've found that I'll sit with Sam and poke around on Facebook. Now from the beginning of MySpace and Facebook I've always felt a tinge of creepiness and narcissism about what we're really doing and/or posting. If you're the type of person to post constantly, the assumption is that someone's going to read yours posts right? If you're not the constant poster type, then you're just perusing other people's lives and pictures and stuff right? Here's an example for you. A couple years ago I was training for and running the Portland Marathon. I had runkeeper posting to Facebook and people were commenting and making training suggestions and I had a friend in Minnesota that I was "cybertraining" with and we would keep each other honest. That was great! I was keeping in touch with people long distances away, and we were challenging each other and keeping each other accountable (you only ran 15 miles!? DUDE!! SUCK IT UP!!!) After I ran the marathon, I kept posting workouts for a while, but as I was doing one of my runs, I thought to myself "why the hell am I still posting these workouts?! Nobody friggin' cares..." and I stopped. Then I started thinking about ALL my posts like that... Does anyone really care that Sam just pooped in the toilet for the first time? Does anyone really care about my Monday morning quarter back-ing? Does anyone really look at my pictures? Why the hell are they looking at my pictures anyway? My wife doesn't like it when I say this, but I'm not that pretty...

Anyway, this has been going on for a while and then of course the recent political shitstorm that has infested America, and the innumerable instances of, "someone on the internet is wrong and I have to correct them" posts about politics or sports or education or whatever. It seems like I haven't had positive interaction on Facebook with anyone in quite a while. More than a year if I were to guess... I mean yeah I chat with people every now and then, and that's kinda' cool, but in general, I'm just wasting time sitting with Sam while he watches whatever annoying pseudo-educational show he's into that week (Dora is the WORST SHOW EVER... sidebar over...) and arguing with ridiculous political assertions, with no prospect of influencing anyone ever. Why am I kicking this dead horse, I say? I should shut off the TV and my computer and wrestle with the kid, or make a mess with something. Boys like that stuff!

"Dude, what does all of this have to do with social networking?!" You ask? Well, I'm glad you asked! One real quick thing here though for some context... A few months ago Tina and I discovered Mark Gungor and his video "Laugh Your Way To a Better Marriage." If you're in a relationship, or planning on getting into one, you should watch this. It's good. I mention it because one of the subjects that he addresses in this video is internet pornography (awkward!). Mr. Gungor is a pastor/counselor (I'm not a religious dude at all, it's still good, he doesn't get preachy or try to do any recruiting) and has seen porn ruin many relationships and seen many people substitute porn for real the relationships in front of them. I don't want to dwell on porn because it is awkward, I'm not accomplished enough of a writer to actually dig into this subject, but you can check out Mark Gungors' website, or for another perspective, look here: www.postmasculine.com and take a gander at the message board about all the men who gave up porn and got back their lives. I bring up this fairly awkward subject matter because both of those sources posit that internet porn is ruining peoples' ability to function as half of a couple. Obviously that's a huge generalization, not everybody who looks at nudie pics has problems functioning in their half of a relationship, but I think you get the idea... People out there are replacing intimate relationships with computer (screen) relationships.

I would hypothesize (reference to Dinosaur Train there!) that Facebook and social networking is doing the same thing to real communities that porn is doing to relationships, in that it makes us think that we are doing something communal, when we're really not. We're still interacting with a screen!

Like I said with porn, Facebook isn't causing complete destruction. Not everyone that uses Facebook has problems functioning and avoids contact with real humans. The one thing that I have noticed on Facebook is that people don't act like they do face to face. For me that's the real evidence to what I'm saying here. I've gotten into what would be knock down drag out fights on Facebook, that I would NEVER get into with someone standing in front of me. I've also had complete strangers on Facebook be unnecessarily rude to me for no particular reason, and I'm not talking about teenagers, I mean people in their 60's and 70's who absolutely know better.

I'm not suggesting we give up all of our technology, and I'm not going to leave my Facebook down forever (just until after elections), but I think we need to take a step back from the screens and realize what's going on around us. Interacting with people through a screen takes away so much of the humanity of the interaction. Watching real live actors do their thing and do it well has so much more power and meaning than watching the Bachelorette or Walking Dead. Hearing and feeling a live professional musical performance has so much more humanity to it than an album, mp3, m4a, or whatever. Putting up tents and having a potluck in the pouring rain with your neighbors has so much more meaning than my homebrewers community on Facebook. That's real communal interaction.

When I start up my Facebook again, I think I'm going to attempt to use it only as a tool for keeping track of people, but not necessarily for keeping in touch. A tool for scheduling and communication, but not as my sole interaction with other humans, maybe not even a significant portion of my interactions!

Shut off the screens people (after you read my completely amateur blog first though!), and go climb a mountain and play in the rain. Do something!