Social Media

"What's on your mind?" Facebook asks me every time I visit the website.

Well, I'm on Facebook. I rejoined social media to better keep in contact with people, especially since I was moving away from most of the people I know. I look at people's posts, comment on things, occasionally chat online with people.

What is Facebook to us? Sure, it's a good way to keep connected with people. It's a way of sharing thoughts and experiences. But let me plunge deeper. Sure, we can read heart-warming or funny stories, see posts of what people have been up to.

But it's not enough.

We watch a video someone shared. We look at a humorous meme that perhaps many of us can relate to. We go through posts about what people have been up to that day. But at the end of the day, how much of it is meaningful, and how much is hollow, only temporary happiness? Does it really fulfill a need, a want? Think about it, now.

Social media connects us. The internet allows us to keep in contact with friends and family, and even chat with people on the other side of the world whom we've never met. But a photo of you at a restaurant, a brief chat message to a friend, isn't enough. While it can help people to keep in touch with each other, it doesn't replace things like hearing a person's voice on the phone, or actually being with them. It's a way to socialize, but not the way. It's like eating a snack, but what your body needs is a square meal. It's like washing your hands when you're coated in mud from head to toe. It's a small thing, an incomplete thing.

I read Facebook posts. I read blog posts. I chat online. Sure, those things can be nice. But when you get down to it, it's insufficient. In talking to somebody on the phone, you can get a level of closeness, a level of intimacy, which is considerably harder to get just from a status update or a chat window. In spending time with someone, actually being face-to-face, no miles or phone lines or cyberspace or other barriers separating you, you get true socialization.

Yes, I'm online. Yes, there are tons of sites which allow me to be 'connected' with people. But ultimately, what I really crave is for the phone to ring and it be a friend or family member. What I really crave is to hang out with people, to talk and laugh and do things with them.

We get so caught up with the latest technology, with the new emoticons and the popular media websites. But that doesn't mean we should abandon things like detailed letter correspondence, or making phone calls, or most importantly, meeting with someone. You can spend all day chatting online and scrolling through posts, and still feel lonely, socially deprived. It's the closeness we need, the actual human contact, the effort to reach out to people and make them feel important, cared about, thought about.

I don't just want a surrogate for socialization. I want real socialization. And that's what the rest of humanity wants, as well. So take a moment to pause from your umpteenth text message, from sharing pictures of cute puppies, from teaming up with Bob in France to defeat the next boss in your MMORPG. Set it all aside occasionally, and spend some time really talking with people. Dial the number of the person you have talked to a long while. Invite an old friend to a movie.

Get closer.