BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Absolving Silicon Valley of Its Social Media Sins

Following
This article is more than 10 years old.

Silicon Valley has developed a guilty conscience as of late. While Wall Street may have taken all of our money, on the West Coast they fear they've taken something else from us: our souls.

There's a growing chorus of engineers, those who created the current social web, who are beginning to feel a little bit bad about "what they've done." They believe they've tainted our relationships and shattered our attention spans with social media.

“If you put a frog in cold water and slowly turn up the heat, it’ll boil to death — it’s a nice analogy,” said Stuart Crabb (via NYT), who is a director of learning and development at Facebook. People “need to notice the effect that time online has on your performance and relationships.”

The idea is that we've been so immersed in the web and all its temptations that our real lives have burnt up in the process. What many fail to realize is that "virtual life" and "real life" have ceased to become two separate entities. We simply live "life," and the web is now a part of that for almost everyone. Why is that such a bad thing?

Is Life All That Different?

For all the doom and gloom about how Facebook is the harbinger of the death of real life social interaction, that has yet to come to pass. Not only is my Facebook feed filled with pictures of friends hanging out together, but the primary purpose of the service is that it allows me to keep in touch with those I wouldn't have otherwise.

Sure, I don't need to be connected to every person I used to sit next to in a college course, but it's neat to see what old friends are doing with their lives, and send them a congratulatory note when they get engaged or a have a child. Would I have even known these events happened without the site? Probably not.

As for my "real" friends? I have yet to see many examples of anyone ceasing to interact with others in person because Facebook or similar sites exist. Skype and Gchat are great for connecting me to a friend who has moved across the country, but you can be damn sure that when they're in town I'm going to grab a drink with them in person.

To say that the web has made our relationships more meaningless would be like decrying the use of the telephone to keep in touch. Why would you ever want to see anyone again when you can just walk two feet to your kitchen and have an operator connect the two of you for a chat? Yet somehow our social lives survived that advance, and that of carrier pigeons and smoke signals before it.

But the internet is social connection beyond the telephone, way beyond. Sites like Twitter and (sigh) Google Plus allow connection between strangers, as do countless topical forums and communities all over the web. Sure, much of it is noise, and there are plenty of trolls to slay, but it's entirely possibly to form friendships purely based on the internet. It's a shame I can't grab lunch with some of my most articulate and interesting followers and readers who live far away, but I take great pleasure in our interactions online, and I hardly feel I would be better off without the ability to connect to them.

You Can't Disappear

The Washington Post is running a story about Katherine Losse, an ex-Facebook higher up that quit her job in favor of moving to a small town of 2,000.  She feels that her work creating more connections for people has decreased the quality of those connections, and to avoid that happening in her own life she removed herself from technology as much as she could.

That's certainly one way of dealing with the problem, but it's hard to realistically say that the shunning of technology is the answer. This is the way life is now, you don't get to go back. Sure, there are a few people living in log cabins pretending it's the 1800s, but the entire rest of the world moves forward without them.

Simply put, we don't really have a choice whether or not to be invested in technology today. There's no returning to a time where it wasn't intertwined with all of our lives. If you want to a get a job in most professional fields these days, it's going to look exceedingly strange if you don't exist on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or at least one such site. Many of your friends will in fact be more prone to forget about you if you don't have a presence online, where they spend much of their time. It may not be "right," but it's reality. As nearly none of us have Ms. Losse's financial resources, we don't have the luxury of living life "off the grid" for the most part.

And why would we want to? This myth that it's impossible to balance an in-person social life and technology doesn't have merit. Of course it's possible to "get addicted" to technology. You can get addicted to anything pleasurable to an unhealthy degree. But people are confusing frequency of use with addiction, which aren't the same thing. Yes, I do spend probably 14 hours a day looking at a screen in some form or another, but has that stopped me from having a great family life, a stalwart collection of friends and a beautiful fiancée? No, and it hasn't for millions upon millions of others who are going about their daily lives while employing the web in all aspects of their existence.

Silicon Valley is a poor sampling pool to start talking about "tech overload." Of course there are going to be people there who have overdosed on internet related devices, as it's the entire focal point of the area. But the vast majority of the rest of us have used the technology for good, not evil. Social web itself is the entire reason I have a job (though that might make me the tiniest bit biased, as I'm definitely invested in keeping people's eyes on screens). It's how I keep in touch with those close to me who have moved away. It's even how I met the girl I love. I live my life the way generations have before me, and it is not defined or defiled by the latest advance in technology.