Learning to Love the Social Media

I text, write emails and use , Facebook on my laptop and Whatsapp on my mobile. For me the social media carry both hopes and fears.

I am grateful to the proprietors of Facebook for contact with long lost cousins and distant friends. To people who are shut in or whose loved ones are on another continent it must be an incalculable boon. But I recall a lunch with some of our grandchildren. The room was eerily silent. Their heads were bowed and they were tapping away at their mobile 'phones. Exasperated my wife threatened to throw the devices in a bucket of water. The intimacy of the remote had stolen the tenderness of the immediate. The precedence of a text can weaken the respect that should be shown the person in front of us. People post pictures of the meals they eat but I cannot help wondering if they are so busy recording and sending that they fail to share the experience with the folk they are with or fail to fully relish the experience for themselves.

Facebook has the potential to raise unexpected barriers. People post about sports and news local to them without a word of explanation. Incomprehensible posts are thrust on to an international medium. This obstructs true communication. Other posts are incomprehensible for another reason. Some friends do not realise that neither body language nor tone of voice is conveyed by Facebook. It leaves me pondering what is explicit and what is ironic.

I note that many posts shared are slogans often prepared by organisations. I fear a danger here for understandably these posts are not nuanced and meant to be striking. Is this becoming a substitute for thought? It is a danger that predates the social media. The press has already tempted us to react in head lines rather than argue carefully from a reasoned moral and philosophic position. This has reduced much of the essential debate in our society to a shouting match and this is not The social media where we do not need to look our protagonist in the eye tempts us to be less well mannered than we would be normally. The advent of the social media could be the dawn of a new age for reasoned argument instead it may be tolling its death knell.

Another of my fears is the decline of certain literary modes of expression. Is the letter, that hunting ground of the biographers of the great, dying? We no longer write a letter but we dash off an email. Not all politicians write articles. Some of them tweet. My fears are just that. They need not come to fruition. The potential of the media is the destruction of intimacy, reasoned debate and careful literary expression but used aright they could also serve their preservation.