Dear Internet,
I’m mad at you.
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had a great relationship these past (let’s see, I got email in 5th grade?) …twelve years. You’ve done a lot for me. I’m grateful to you.
But the part of you that’s classified as “social networking” has disappointed me as of late.
You used to be so thoughtful. You would let me write lengthy emails back and forth with people I cared about and we would pose questions, gossip, discuss our love lives, and reminisce together.
And then you gave us Xanga, and we all got one, and even though we weren’t extremely eloquent writers at the age of 13:
Hihi peeps. What is up with the away messages??? God like half the people on my buddy list are away. If you’re away for more than like, an hour, DONT DO AN AWAY MESSAGE, SIGN OUT. Ok…..got that outta my system…..lol. OKAYY so I am supposed to do HW rite now but I am procrastinating, big suprise there. Haha Jason is coming back this weekend already!! Guess he misses home and Japanese food! Can’t live w/out it. Maybe I’ll go to collage at UCI and live at home so my mom can cook Japanese food 4 me! hahaha….not. Wowo this is the longest entry I’ve had yet! coolio. ALRIGHTY hope you all are doing good, cause I am! NUMBER 3 IN GEOMETRY WHOOHOO!!!!OO… I figured out my new cell phone #…its 749-2339. I think. So call me on dat one, k?
it was still a place where we talked about our thoughts and our lives in detail. It was a space where we were the creators and got to craft grammatically-horrendous sentences about us and our apparently extremely passionate disdain for the inappropriate use of away messages, and we tried to be thoughtful. If we included pictures they were intended to supplement our words.
And at the same time, you gave us AOL Instant Messaging (AIM).
This opened up a bunch of possibilities.
When we got home from school, we could continue our conversations and our schemes to force a group of boys into becoming our guy friends and asking us to Winter Formal (long story).
We could flirt with our crush and open chat rooms with the entire sixth grade class and collectively wonder if the teacher really didn’t notice that we were shooting staples at her during that whole volcano lesson.
AIM was awesome, and we had many quality conversations on it.
And then, you offered us MySpace and shortly after, Facebook.
We added our best friends and had moments of confusion/anxiety when you expected us to rank them from best to last resort.
We didn’t really get the point of Facebook “statuses” (Kelly Osajima is: wondering what to write here) , so we mostly ignored them and instead wrote on our friends’ “walls” and carried out “wall-to-wall” conversations.
We browsed for an hour or so, then we shut you off and went back to whatever it is high school students do (failing AP Chem in my case…although my teacher pitied me and my balancing-equations-disability so much that she ended up letting me scrape by with a C-).
I like to think that we had a healthy relationship, Internet- we had some quality engagement, but knew when to put space between us.
But now, I don’t really know what’s happened to you.
You replaced Xanga with Tumblr, and instead of writing about their thoughts and their lives in detail, people “reblog” attractive pictures and stuff that other people said, and it’s not a journal at all as much as a confusing jumble of funny memes created by others and inspirational quotes said by others.
It’s annoying, because I go to my friends’ blogs hoping to hear about them, not about random strangers.
And that’s kind of what you did to Facebook as well.
It’s no longer really a place to communicate with specific people as much as a void where we throw out twenty thousand separate insignificant things like instagram pictures of our food, and what movies we’re about to watch, and how we don’t like the current weather, to no one in particular just all 2500 of our “friends” who are all doing the same thing and consequently it’s stupid and incredibly overwhelming.
And I get why people like it- you play up our narcissism. We enjoy posting these statuses because when 50 people “like” it, it translates to “50 people think you’re awesome!” in our heads that so often need reassuring that we are as loved as we hope we are.
And we devote much more time than we should to looking at all fifty million of these stupid posts because you made it addicting, and does any of it really impact us or help us grow?
And of course, when you came around to introducing Twitter I lost what little respect I had left for you. How are we supposed to type something meaningful in 140 characters?
I’m sorry for getting emotional.
The point is, Internet, I’m upset at what you’ve turned us into. Passive spectators when we used to be thoughtful creators. Sometimes I feel like a zombie, mindlessly scrolling through newsfeed and not really benefiting from any of it. And when we do create, it’s an Instagrammed photo, it’s 140 characters. How many people write blog posts nowadays as long as this one? Not a lot because it just isn’t normal anymore. And we’re not used to putting in the time anymore.
In retrospect, I guess it isn’t really, entirely your fault. Sure, you provided the forum, but I guess we’re the ones that used it the way we do now. So I guess what I really want to say is this:
Dear People on the Internet (including myself),
We’re constantly plugged into our social network sites, we’re constantly updating each other, but it’s an overload of unnecessary information. We need to decrease the massive quantities of what we choose to put up and increase the quality of what we’re saying. And we need to remember what we used to use social networking for- as a meaningful supplement to our relationships - and maybe try to get back to that a little.
And when you get a cool looking burger at dinner with your friends, maybe instead of giving in to your first instinct of “Wow, I gotta get a picture of this then instagram it, then put it on Facebook so everyone else can “like” it!”, maybe you could just enjoy the food, leave your smartphone in your pocket, and focus your full attention on the people sitting there with you. And if something crazy happens at dinner, laugh about it and turn it into a great story to tell people later on. Or, you could always blog about it. (;
Love, Kelly
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