Faceless Society – An Adverse Side Effect of Rapidly Growing social media. Are we losing who we really are?

Welcome to Faceless Society

Good morning, folks! I am Jin with Morning Mindfulness Podcast. Hope you are having a fantastic day! Let’s breathe and smile.

About 2 years ago, I was watching a couple of comedians on YouTube. A guy and a girl are meeting in the park for the first date. They met in one of the online chats rooms, so obviously they liked each other and decided to meet. What was funny, they both brought a printed Avatar, a picture they used to represent them online. Just like people meet somebody at the airport. After greeting each other, like, are you so and so, and talking for a while, they decided to get married with one condition: they agreed to chat with each other online at least a couple of times a week. So they stay could connected as a family, I guess.

As funny as it was, that represented one of the biggest issues of today’s society. We become faceless. It started a couple of decades ago with forums, where people were writing whatever they wanted. They would argue, use bad names, whatever, and I can guarantee, many of them would not even have a back bone to say it in person. The internet will forgive it, right? They never had to reveal their identity. I can pose as a Pope if I want to.

Now we have Facebook. Thousands of “friends”. Really? No, they are not friends. They may be fans, or just online connections. You and I are lucky to have 2-3-4 real friends. All those likes, loves, hears quite often become so generic without a real meaning. Social Networking is becoming an anti-social club, because people talk online more, and less in person.

We had a running joke years ago, when ICQ was so popular: you are a computer geek if you don’t know the gender of 10 of your best friends because they have neutral nick names and you never bothered to ask who they were.

Now I see people staring at their smart phones everywhere, all the time, like it is Zombie Apocalypse… or faceless society. It beeps and we instantly look at it. We are getting trained like Pavlov’s dogs.

I use technology too. It’s OK to use it, just make sure it is your servant, not your master.
Think about it.

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PEACE!
Jin

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