Anti-Social Networks

Let’s talk about social networks.  Do they entice people to socialize or are they simply tools that allow people to pseudo-interact with one another? The space between our interactions as real people, as opposed to virtual people, must not always be filled with online check-ins, proof of existence, self-accolades, or veiled criticisms. The virtual space that we occupy needs more substance; elsewise, we are living like vapid fools amidst infinite information.

Should a friend not virtually check-in, they might be assumed dead or otherwise living a life of tear-jerking boredom. In this way, social networks can be very much enslaving. They can be a slow amalgamation into oppression, where introversion proliferates each successive generation by the same rate at which technology has propagated our society’s youth. This is all very much sacrilegious to the true act of living life, which has become but a sheer reenactment of life. We sit in a place with set parameters. A pre-defined portal.

Should one actually bring to light a topic of real discussion, one of great controversy, one with actual merit, they must carefully phrase themselves to an audience of lurkers ready to pounce on anything outside of the realm of widely accepted.

Should one remain personal and open enough to speak on their conviction, they will run the risk of complete disregard, chastisement, or the online equivalent to being “shanked”... bare buttocks and all. This is what it feels like to have one’s persona rejected by what digi-merica says are the only friends that really matter. These friends, these online reaffirmations, dare I say those who are apostles for idolatry, are sometimes mirages of drought-like proportions, under which we are actually sucked away from the people who transcend it all.

We “like” things rather than actually live. We share rather than create. There is no punctuation because there is no sentence structure.  The real meaning of anything becomes suspect.  We sink with perfect posture and a rising tolerance for mediocrity.

And so I ask: At what point did we all succumb to the temptress who drew us in…. the thief who taught us to live vicariously through others? Others… among which is a large faction of people who are mirroring all the others, along with which is an even greater set that is actually begging for credit from peers, through transparent and pathetic acts, in what is the furthest thing from a meritocracy that an environment could actually depict?