After school yesterday, Smallsteps and I spent time practicing our cursive writing. She was introduced to it last week by a substitute teacher in a class and has now taken an interest in it. She is actually pretty good already, considering that it is not the way they have learned to write at school at all. So we sat down together with some lined paper and wrote. For me, I used to write a lot and was pretty good at cursive, because my mum taught me. At school was a struggle, because I was forced to conform to the writing standards to pass the writing classes, which I hated. So whenever I wasn't in class, I wrote in cursive. But it was weird sitting there and writing neatly by hand yesterday, because I so rarely do it now.
Tens of millions of words written over the last few years. Not many by hand.
However, something else potentially interesting came up while we did this, as my daughter wrote Mummy, Daddy and Smallsteps and then proceeded to write the names of her friends in cursive next to her name, the name of my friends next to mine and then the same next to her mother. When she got to her mother she added our neighbour, who has been a close friend for almost forty years and then paused, looked at me and asked,
"Who else are mummy's friends?"
She has friends of course, but the problem is that she doesn't actually see them. Nor does she call them. She stays somewhat in contact with them online, but most of that is voyeuristic, so she knows what is happening through what they post, but doesn't know any of their daily life activity.
Are they friends at all?
Even her close friend who literally lives across the road from us, we barely see, as there is always an excuse not to, too busy, illness, the house isn't clean etc. However, as I see it, with friends you not only make the time, but the bar to seeing friends should be incredibly low. Friends don't care if the place is a mess, especially since our house is never messy.
But I suspect that my wife isn't alone in this and I asked a client today (who himself was talking about the social media addiction he has) and how often he sees his actual friends that he checks on social media, considering that most of them live in the same small town he is from. His answer, was almost never.
It takes the "social" aspect out and just leaves the media.
I don't have many friends myself and even fewer since having a stroke, because my own motivation to organise is incredibly low and some of my friends just haven't wanted to engage much after. This was also amplified by Covid restrictions. Still though, I do make attempts and organise to see some of my friends regularly enough that at least Smallsteps knows who they are. But more than that, she also knows some of their kids, even when they are much older or younger.
I was thinking about this as it is this aspect that creates social network in a community across generations, because people interact with each other through a couple degrees of separation. In a small town, everyone knows everyone, not because they are all friends, but because there is a spiderweb of relationships that connect people together. But the usage of social media as it has come to pass, as largely broken the web apart, with people having less interaction with the people who live and work locally.
Part of this is as my client was saying today, that social media is compelling, as it has so much content. And this is true in one respect, but what actually makes it addictive isn't the range of content there, but the dopamine hit from finding a single interesting thing in a sea of irrelevance, and the highly repetitive action of scrolling. People don't keep going back because of what they find in content, they go back because they want another high, and their fingers are so used to scrolling that they get uncomfortable when not doing it.
But at what cost?
As I asked my client who has expressed interest in learning the drums, "How good would you be if you spent half the time you do on social media for the next year, playing the drums instead?"
Very good.
And while not everyone wants to learn an instrument, most people on social media also have things that they "don't have the time" to do, because they are spending their time scrolling instead. My wife spends too long on there and like a smoker, believes it is relaxing her. But the relaxation is from the dopamine fix and the something to do with the hands - just like smoking. Instead though, she could spend her time talking with her friends in real life, or going to the gym, or reading a book, or learning how to knit, or whatever the hell else she wants to do.
But more importantly than what an individual could do with that time, is what a community could do with it, as building a strong, healthy community doesn't just happen, it takes time and effort. It takes actions that bring people together to share experiences, and it takes actions that connect people across generations in order to take the community into the future also. One of the problems we have seen now in terms of community building, is that people are so fractured, so disconnected from others at the local level, that there isn't much community left at all, let alone a healthy one.
There are good sides to social media usage.
But I struggle to think of any that are so good, that they negate all the bad they do in terms of the breakdown of society, information integrity, and physical and mental health outcomes. We can do better, and there is likely a healthy place for the digital community also, but I suspect it only works when it is used as a support for real world interaction and relationship building, not as a replacement.
But, it is far too convenient to just scroll through life.
Taraz
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