I gracefully slid my rigid fingertips over the keyboard of my T-Mobile MDA and nonchalantly keyed, “I think you should weigh your options and not mistake human mistakes for divine intervention.” This is the message I casually relayed to an associate who told me she was a month pregnant. That night when deleting the hundreds of text messages that I had accumulated that day, I reflected on how impersonal and inconsiderate I was to not call my friend when she said she had something important to talk to me about. I realized that we have become a generation of remote communication. Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook and text messaging have consumed our exchange of ideas between one another, virtually making us socially illiterate. Nearly every day I spy five or more students in class browsing one of these sites in between note taking and lectures. It has become an obsessive craze that can be viewed either as a positive entity, creating personal relationships among people who otherwise would have never interacted, or a negative entity in which people get lost in a world of HTML and forget how to properly communicate with one another. Some argue these sites are a supplement to interaction with one another as opposed to a replacement. Is it possible for us to render ourselves communication-challenged and then resume personal relationships right where we left off? I say yes. As an unyielding enthusiast for social networking sites, I believe it is more than feasible to think that we can multi-task. However, we must first become conscious of when and where personal and impersonal communication is appropriate. Apparently, according to my irresponsible escapade of text messaging an entire personal conversation, I am guilty of impersonal communication at an inappropriate time. The bank accounts of the investors of these sites are counting on our addiction to continue. Like many modern fads, however, these sites could be here today and gone tomorrow. The sites must keep their members interested with adding new features almost on a weekly or monthly basis. According to Wharton Knowledge, a University of Pennsylvania informational Web site, there are nearly 300 social networking sites including Facebook, geared to college students, LinkedIn, aimed at professionals, adam4adam for the gay community and Xanga, a blog-based community site. There are also smaller sites including StudyBreakers for high schoolers and Photobucket, a site for posting images. Also, according to ComScore Media Metrix, MySpace, with its 70 million users, ranks second behind Yahoo in pages viewed and time spent on the site. Facebook, founded by a 21-year-old student on leave from Harvard and backed by Silicon Valley venture capitalists, has 7.3 million registered users. The negative accounts concerning these sites are seemingly countless. Not too long ago Facebook introduced mini-feed that allowed members to see the immediate actions of their members when they logged onto their accounts. This riled users into protesting Facebook, calling it a stalker site and claiming it was a serious invasion of privacy. The crack-like addiction to the site becomes evident when these same complainers fail to deactivate their accounts.  Thanks to sites like MySpace, parents are finding that their children are not as naive and youthful as they once believed. Young teens are starting personal and sexual relationships with adults, making sites like this a potential playground for pedophiles and perverts. Just yesterday a friend shared with me that her roommate was dating a man from France she had met on MySpace and had only met in person once. She claimed to be in love with this man; however, I’d beg to differ. I would bet my writing hand that she is infatuated with his embellished profile, finding comfort in his larger-than-life persona and doctored pictures. Online you can be whomever you choose; it is a fantasy world full of fairytales and fantasies. It is a haven for those with low self-esteem and introverted personalities. People who otherwise are socially-challenged nourish their communal needs on the Web, seemingly making them closer to “ordinary people.” Living in a world where people fear rejection, text messaging and e-mailing seem to be an easy way to ease the damage. How much simpler is it for us to cancel a date through a few words in a text than actually call and hear the disappointment in that person’s voice? If you are fortunate, you won’t receive a phone call after your text, if not, good luck explaining why you are too shallow and inconsiderate to call and verbally cancel your date. The fact that we see nothing wrong with this act of inhumanity is a sheer sign of changing times. Imagine when our parents were our age, and cell phones and the Internet were still a distant thought. We must distinguish when it is appropriate to use these advanced forms of communication and when old fashioned face-to-face communication is needed to ensure that future generations will have basic social motor skills and a sense of conventional decency.
—–Contact Shanelle Matthews at [email protected]