The Death of Human Interaction: A Pitfall of the Social Network

Not that many years ago there was a thriving business in my hometown of Columbiana, Ohio called The Lazy Bean Cafe. When it moved into its location in mid-2002 it was the place to be for all the kids (and even adults) in the community. It was the only place in town that made and served smoothies right in front of your eyes. The prices were doable for even the kids my age to get something a few times a week. The Lazy Bean also supported local art by having free concerts every Friday night for local bands. It was the place where you would meet friends to go somewhere or just to hangout in the Cafe. A place where people of all ages would meet to catch up with old friends or spend time with the friends they see daily. And so business was thriving for the owners of the Lazy Bean Cafe. For a few years, things went on this way. Even through the beginnings of the recession the cafe remained strong and stable. Overall, the people of my small community saw little effect, for the most part, from the recession. Which is why things stayed mainly stagnant as far as the local market was concerned. Yet for some reason the Lazy Bean cafe was losing business. People were just not going there anymore. Personally, I know my friends still always had money to spend. The Cafe wasn't doing anything that would drive people away, at least not at that point in 2007. Everything was how it always had been, except that people just weren't buying their product anymore, and people weren't meeting or hanging out with friends their anymore. So in late-2008 they had to start taking drastic measures to keep their business afloat. They fired some of their workers and lowered the amount of hours the Cafe was open. Things didn't improve. So about a year after they did this they had to increase the prices of their product in order to make ends meet, which drove away most of the remaining consumers. They lasted only a few months after they changed their menu prices. The members of the community were quick to blame the company's change of menu and prices for the reason their business was plummeting, but I saw through it. I know they wouldn't have had to change their menu if people were consistently coming to buy their products. The reason that the business failed wasn't because of anything they did. It was because people were no longer having conversations over bagels and coffee in their restaurant. There was no longer a need for a public place for people to meet up and talk. Their target market had been taken over by something more convenient, and the real world atmosphere they created was being replaced by something with no feelings or emotions at all. Something made of cold metal and wires. Something cheaper and easier to be a part of. Something that allowed you to have your entire social circle at your finger tips: an internet based social network. Since it's inception in 2004, Facebook has surpassed Decayenne, Friendster, Myspace and all other social networks and become the most populace internet website in the world. More than five-hundred million people have joined the Facebook experience since its beginning and it is growing with every second of the day. Most of these users log on to Facebook everyday; and why shouldn't they? It's the easiest way to keep in contact with what their friends are up to as well as tell them what they have been up to. Sure does beat the heck out of having to walk somewhere to meet them and talk in person. Saves time, money, and most importantly energy. Now, you don't even have to dial a phone number to talk to someone in real time. You just click their name and a box pops up for you to message them. Still, can you actually say that you are talking in â€Å"real time,† can you even really call it a conversation? After all, you can't see the person at all. Well, you can't SEE them when you are talking on the phone either! That is true, but at least you can hear their actual voice. At least on the phone you don't have to guess at which syllable they were emphasizing. You don't have any confusion as to what is meant by what they said when you hear the inflection of their voice coming directly from their mouth. On the phone, you can hear the timing in which things are said. You instinctively become aware of a certain tempo in the conversation and that allows the conversation to flow. Facebook chatting destroys all of this natural human interaction. People no longer have to respond immediately like they would on the phone or in person. They have time to think of exactly what they would want this person to hear. Further diminishing, not only a person's instinctive personality, but also skewing the way they are seen by the one they are talking to. Forming an unnatural bond between these people who may know nothing about the actual person, the one behind the mask being displayed. With the benefits of this new digital age come the drawbacks that we are all too aware of. Dateline's To Catch A Predator is just one such source that exposes what happens when you think you've gotten to know someone online. Although this is an extreme case for a situation that has been fiercely combated, these things happen on a much smaller scale on these social network sites daily. This is partially because when human's interact in person, we absorb all things about that person – their facial expressions, body language, voice inflection, tone of voice, speech volume, and the overall aura that a person gives off. So when all of these things are taken out of the equation and all we have are the person's words, we begin to interpret what they are saying our own way. We begin to craft this person in our head that does not match who they are in real life. We make them into something more drastic than they are, whether that be good or bad. The reason we do this is because the human mind, by nature, is used to having the whole experience when we are talking to people. Our brains are used to having all of the aspects listed above when we are conversing with a person. So intuitively our head begins to replace these missing elements with things that it does recognize. Which could be memories of the person, things you have dreamed of or even had nightmares of. The brain brings in things it has thought about before to fill in the missing gaps. Forging an unbridgeable gap between these people, caused by the natural happenings of their brain. So, since one cannot control the instincts of the human mind, who is there to blame for this loss of human connection? These social networks have made it so we no longer have to, or want to, leave our computers to talk to our friends. They have allowed us to form these people in our heads without ever really knowing about them. This networks make it simple to keep in touch, but impossible to actually touch those we talk to. Imagine that all of your friends, all of the people you care for, are symbolized by a cotton ball. Now, a general term for that cotton ball is a â€Å"Monkey Sphere. † The reason it gained such a name was because, while testing monkeys, scientists noticed that all monkeys tended to have only about 10 to 12 other monkeys that they could cooperate with at one time. Their â€Å"monkey sphere. † They are all the monkeys that one would care for, defriend, marry, etc. And any primate outside of this sphere the monkey rejects. After this research was taken, these scientists wanted to see if the same principles applied to humans as well. Now although they are still running tests, it is clear that the human's sphere is no doubt larger than a monkey's just by the nature of the human brain. It simply holds more information. However, it still has its capacity for overall inter-human relationships and affections just as the monkey's brain does. This finite amount of human connection can be most easily displayed as, like I had stated above, a cotton ball. Without the use of these networking websites your cotton ball would, no doubt, be smaller. And will get smaller the older you get. The ball will be very small and very clumped up, but very dense. Meaning, the relationships you do have are extremely close and personal relationships. Relationships where you almost know what the person is thinking or what they are going to say, without having to ask them. Facebook can't give you that. What it can give you, however, is a much wider cotton ball. A much more outstretched monkey sphere. It does allow you to keep in contact with people that you would otherwise lose touch with. Still, by doing so it thins out the cotton ball a great deal. Someone with this cotton ball has few or no close personal relationships. They never felt the aura of the other individual in person, so they never know exactly what this person is all about. People like this will never experience a true, deep connection with another person. Never realize the similarities that lay within all people. These social networks would combat all of this by saying that their whole purpose for the site is to expand the monkey sphere. Which they do, no doubt about that. These sites definitely allow people to find and reconnect with people they have lost in their past. It lessens the social, cultural, and geographical divide throughout the world and allows more people to care for more people. And while doing so, decreases the separation between all people. Which are all undoubtably good things. We want people to care for other people. We want to encourage new relationships and rekindled ones alike. But at what cost are we constructing these relationships? We are sacrificing real human connection. We are losing the human touch, the human condition. We are steering away from personal contact and toward a world where people talk only through the digital realm. And if we keep this up, soon human interaction will be nothing but short statements and awkward pauses. Soon our monkey sphere's will be so stretched out that they won't be monkey sphere's at all. They will be pulled so thin that we start to lose people off the edges. Then since the whole thing is spread so thin it is only a matter of time until even those at the center of it our lost in passing. All because there was no actual interaction between these people to tie them tighter together. Leaving us as only isolated and lonely individuals. Broken entities wondering lost in a world of blank, empty faces. We can't allow this to happen. We have to take these technological advances as what they are, secondary ways of communications. If we allow them to replace face-to-face discussion then we are destined to lose the the greats part of the human condition. Which is knowing, appreciating, and experiencing other people and their personalities. We need to resuming the bagel-and-coffee talks. The walks together to the corner bistro or down the street. We can't lose the desire to be in the presence of other people. Or Lazy Bean Cafes everywhere will continue to close. Public social networks will become a thing of yesteryear and we will lose ourselves in a sea of people pretending to be what they are not. And, ultimately, we will lose ourselves along the way.