The age of the internet and the end of interaction
A 21st century socialite
At the risk of turning into my Dad, I feel more and more alienated by the internet-driven society in which we live. Being twenty, I can remember a time when not every household had a computer (gasp!), let alone two or three, and when the Internet was something of a novelty whereby you could keep in contact with those relatives in Australia. This was not so long ago: the then Chancellor of the Exchequer still occupies one of the top two positions of government.This same man recently stated in The Times that a “fast internet connection is now seen by most of the public as an essential service, as indispensable as electricity, gas and water”.
Brown was rightly ridiculed by pint-sized comedian Andy Hamilton for this somewhat brash statement, but unfortunately Brown has a point, at least with regards to Britain. We now live in a state where everything is internet-based. My university, Sheffield, is a striking example of this. Everything academic, from lecture content to reading lists to exam results and seminar timetables, is done online. On the odd occasion the service becomes unavailable absolute chaos ensues.
I can still remember from my first year in halls that when the internet connection died for a mere moment or so, sixteen lads would all emerge out onto the corridor blinking in the sunlight, as if the government had just announced that water would no longer be available. Cue panic and complaining. The same applies to any other company or public service. I get ferociously pissed off that phoning the bank I am merely referred to an online form or web address, which inevitably fails to resolve my problem. The concept of two people using their voices to contact one another, even over the phone, appears to have died out. Does anyone even know how to go about booking flights without an internet connection? I don’t.
And even in a society as materialistic and as devoted to consumerism as ours, people no longer seem to own ‘things’. Whenever I buy a CD (even that being from an internet site) my friends ridicule me as something of a technophobe. The majority of our generation no longer own any records. It is all downloaded (most of it illegally). Does anyone still go to the cinema? Or own actual, physical, tangible photographs? We can do anything through our computers, but through our computers we have learnt to do nothing. And it has become normal. Although students are something of an extreme example, many eighteen to twenty-year olds positively enjoy spending entire days in the company of their best friend, Mr. Laptop. Christ, even congregating around the television to watch Match Of The Day is a dying art: many groups of mates just sit in the same room, each immersed on their laptop, in total silence.
This brings me on to the last evil of my puritanical rant: Facebook. Now, I’ll admit, I am a slave to Facebook, we all are. It seems strange to me that people are so interested in cyber-socialising that they have forgotten how to interact face-to-face. You can add someone as a ‘friend’ that you may have met once, for a whole minute, but will you ever arrange to go for a drink or meet up? Even if you were to, by chance, meet, would you really want to chat to one another? It would seem that people are now only prepared to talk from behind the safety of a screen, with time to think of an articulate or witty response and the opportunity to avoid social faux-pas. Students as a whole are living in the land of Facebook, and those who don’t have it are seen as medieval peasants: people who believe the earth is flat and that Michael Jackson really did have vitiligo. What a mess.
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