Technological world taking over our society

VIRGINIA CALCAGNI — Staff Writer

Welcome to the world – the technological world that is.  Facebook, Twitter, Google +, and countless other social networking sites are something that people cannot seem to live without.

Everything is at our fingertips. Events, musicians, news, movies, how people are feeling.

I was at work the other day and assisted a woman in finding a CD that she was looking for.  While we were talking about music she mentioned she was listening to country music because it took her mind off the fact that she is going through a divorce and has a small strand of cancer.

I was almost astonished by the brutal honesty and outrightness of her statement, and I started to think, what if she had posted a status on Facebook? What would people have said?

Every time I log onto Facebook and see someone posting a status about them being upset, or having something wrong with them, someone always questions: Why?  If the person doesn’t give up the information, they are automatically viewed as trying to seek out attention or something along those lines.  I have seen statuses from people saying, “I am so upset. OMG ask me what is wrong and I won’t tell you!”

It seems as though the Internet and social networking especially have sucked the empathy and caring right out of some, if not all of us.

It is really easy to fall out of caring, too, with these social networks; we have access to everything that people decide to post.

There are no boundaries. There is drama, happiness, sadness and anger, all expressed not to someone’s face, but through a little chat box on the Internet.

Like people getting engaged. It is posted on the Internet, and all the congratulations are done online. The ring is posted as a photo. There is no showing it off on your hand to everyone; that is now reserved for Facebook.

Babies have Facebooks now. I mean, it seems like every moment a person can have isn’t just reserved for them anymore.  I understand that people want to show these things off because they are big things in life, but a lot of people have friends on social networks that they may have only met once or twice.

People want others to see that they are successful – or that they aren’t – so they can try to get those empathetic responses.

Bullying has even come down to being done in the cyber world, and it is the worst form of harassment.  Articles and movies have been made about this form of abuse.

While the technology that we have today is amazing and helps us through our everyday lives, it is hard to put it down.  You can’t walk through campus without seeing most people glued to their cell phones or talking about what they posted on Facebook that morning, or a picture they saw online.

It is like there cannot be a world without Facebook now. These technological aspects of our lives are so huge that there is hardly a life without them.  It is how businesses are starting to sell and promote things, how events and bands get larger, how some people meet and fall in love.

It just seems like a lot of situations now are impersonal. Instead of talking to someone face-to-face and verbally sharing in someone’s emotion, you read about them, and get sick of it because you have seen the same post 15 other times that day, and you are having an equally crappy day.

What ever happened to “treat others the way you want to be treated” or just taking the time out to listen and pay attention to someone, like the women who told me her story at work? All she wanted was something to make her day – something to make her happy – and I helped her by finding her a CD. Take that social networking.