Social Media: Can't Live With It; Can't Live Without It!

I remember pressing the “send” button on that first email felt like diving off a cliff —as terrifying, as exhilarating. My threatened, and admittedly precious, terms of agreement in those heady days were that I would not report on my outer life, or any daily activities, but rather share glimpses of my mental diary.

For more or less the same reasons (perhaps, out of a writerly fear of being consumed?) I never owned a mobile phone, until I moved to the US, around twelve years ago. Why willingly carry a tracer, I thought, shrilly interrupting my inner dialogue at any moment? If someone needed to contact me, urgently, they could reach me at home or work.

But, the rest of the time was mine: to dream, to escape, to slip in-between the gaps. Now, I confess, my i-phone serves as a kind of life-support machine, and I suspect I am not alone. I’m still not overly fond of speaking on it but, I confess I panicked when my iphone crashed a week ago, and I was without it for a few days. Over time, I've come to almost think of texting as a kind of telepathy and share my life, in a kind of trance, on Steemit, and less so, also Facebook and Twitter.

Yesterday, I finally surrendered and created an Instagram account. Despite wishing to simplify my life (and spend less time online) I made the decision to join Instagram after finding out that my poetry and aphorisms, already, existed on that platform and were being shared by others. What a strange, and marvelous thing, the independent life of words. How, despite even the protestations of their author, they still manage to reach out and make friends and find their audience :)

So, it seems that the world itself is now migrating online. Fine, I’ll work with it. Not just for survival’s sake must we stoop to conquer this brave new world, but also because it’s spiritually foolish to condescend. I have friends, writer friends only slightly older than myself, who regard social media as infra dig, insisting it “means us harm”. I get it, or a part of me does; but the other part doesn’t. It might be virtual, but it’s still real people in real time. Managed judiciously, that is to say with intelligence and care, it’s simply too great a learning experience to pass up.

Wherever people congregate, en masse, for sustenance – such as the great communal wells of social media – one must pay attention. Real friendships are forged in these virtual communities, vital news shared, and that most elusive thing of all, inspiration, sparked from so many souls colliding in wonder and thirst for human contact. And, yes, I am still aware of the many serious dangers: the regrettable narcissism networking engenders, the cluttering of our inner spaces, the real and paradoxical isolation that results from so much online “socializing” as well as the attendant erosion of social skills and, no less importantly, the damage to our attention spans.

Specifically, in regards to how the Internet can detrimentally affect our concentration, meaning our capacity for immersive reading and/or critical thinking, I remember being set alight a few years ago by an Atlantic magazine article (which the author, Nicholas Carr, recently developed into a book). The title of the piece encapsulated all my misgivings, Is Google Making Us Stupid?: What the internet is doing to our brains. Shortly after this seminal, but somewhat alarmist, piece, a slew of articles, backed by scientific studies, made a counter argument: Google and the Internet might be making us smarter. True, multi-tasking stands to make memory worse, they suggested, but certain types of memory are improving as search engines reroute our brains.

“Abundance of books makes men less studious” stated a critic of the printing press, Hieronimo Squarciafico, as early as the 15th century. This might well be the case today, too, with the wealth of unsorted, uneven information available at our fingertips. Yet, perhaps this truth also speaks to our innate laziness as a species, rather than the evils of abundance. For those with discipline and curiosity to sift through the buried treasures (as well as the sanity not to live online), the Internet need not be a soul-destroying monster, but potentially, a life-enhancing tool.

Art, by Asaf Hanuka