I've kind of done this as I've gone along, so it may look sloppy and possibly a tad contradictory at times. Ah, well. I hope you find my opinions readable at least.
At 8/3/09 08:08 AM, Peregrinus wrote:
First off, let's avoid this turning into a religious flame war,
For this reason, I've decided to leave out my thoughts on what Mr. Nichols has said about euthanasia in that article. It may be slightly relevant to your points of discussion, but it's a religion-based question really. Lord knows I don't want to open that can of worms here. Put briefly, I don't agree with his thoughts on the legal side of things. Anyway...
Points of Discussion:
- Is social networking causing a decline in real life social encounters?
Mr. Nichols links in individualism according to this article. More extreme forms of individualism may come around as a result of social networking sites becoming popular, but they're definitely not the sole cause of that. Individualism is pretty much a defining feature of how "developed" nations across the globe work. For years it's been acceptable to treat societies with a more collectivist attitude as inferior and unproductive. That wasn't because of social networking sites, it's just how a lot of the people that make the rules want people to think.
Anyway, I've got that off my chest. I do agree with the archbishop though when he refers to a lot of it being dehumanising. Whether that dehumanisation is notable enough to really shut someoe off from the real world and that person's community is a different matter, I think. It might happen in a more extreme cases that just happens to be blow out of proportion by the media, politicians, or whoever. Most people seem to manage to maintain their real social lives. I think as humans, a lot of us don't really care if we're dehumanised, because we can still do things that wren't possible otherwise. Even with that in mind though as I've said, many people realise that when they're dehumanised, they can't do other things that make them feel valued or an asset to someone/something.
The people to be concerned about, of course, are the ones that are already suffering from a lack of interaction with others. That's when the e-world almost makes its own space inside the person's mind...
- Do you think social networking and the rush to get as many friends as possible can lead to depression and/or suicide?
Linking in my last point above, in extreme cases it's possible, if not exactly likely by comparison. Taking an "everyone from the top" view of suicide (which is oddly dehumanising in itself, but bear with me), you could say it's all about integration. This is a strange age because our obsession with communication is generally taken to me that we're all positively integrated with each other all of the time. However, we can still far into traps of integration on both sides. On one end, (the more obvious one) someone might not be integrated enough, and when they're using social networking sites or even just a simple forum constantly, depression might come about due to the expected changes not arriving. That person might fail again and again to make relationships in that e-community. On the other side of the coin, someone might be too integrated to the extent that it becomes their whole life, and when not much comes back as a result of Internet-driven dehumanisation, that person might have a bad revelation about their life.
As much I'm sorry in advance for bringing this up, I think it's worth it: the more popular social networking communities like MySpace and Facebook work along similar structures of our real-life communities, because the same values are pushed. It's all about spending money, making money, being deemed a "success" by others, individualism (as I said earlier); it's not exclusive to those websites, it works like real life. I mean, just reading a little bit about the owners of those websites and their ideals makes this obvious. Try to combine it with what I've tried to say about integration. Something might be fun, but it's still relatively easy to become a slave to that relief from real-life. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's comparable to recreational drugs or anything, but it's something that might lead to depression.
Like some have already said (and I see this a lot on the BBS, perfectly understandably actually), it can be taken out of proportion by the media, those in politics and certain groups. For something like suicide, I don't think there's usually one single answer as to why someone would do it. We just like simplified answers. I've done this myself in this very post, to tie things to integration rather than what the person might actually feel. Thinkers on the other side of things have come up with some different criteria... but overall it's generally a switched version of the integration/regulation view. Still, it's about how the individual feels about their relationships personally, which is easily applied to people getting upset on social networking sites.
I'm going to link this here just for basic thoughts on the top-down view of integration/regulation in suicide. It might not actually be relevant today what with our holy postmodern thinking and all that, but yeah. There are more than a few reasons why people have said that work is a load of bollocks, but just for the sake of being brief here... ramble ramble.
- As a society, are we losing our ability to create and hold a real social environment on a day to day basis? Or are we relying too much on web-based social medias?
I think a lot of people across the world still have the ability to create and use their own real-life social environment. Some, including myself, might use web-based social medias too much, but I think it's important to keep things as they are in mind. Our real lives and our e-lives, no matter how much it's joked about, haha, etc. are obviously connected to one another. Keep your real being in mind, and the "reliance" might never even be a problem, for those that love the Internet. Remember that those websites have their designs too, and in particularly nasty cases of you being turned into a number and being forced to worship the almighty dollar to be wary. Everyone has their opinion on that, and I've probably not worded it very well. It's relevant though, because that carries it's own style of pressure. Anyway, I'm rambling again.
I'm honestly not sure how to really respond to this last point. Erm, globally, I think it's entirely possible to have a balance for the majority of people.
