Today is Day Seven of Week Two of
the Omer. That is Day Fourteen of the
Omer. The theme of the Week is Relationships.
It’s amazing how much our culture
has been, and is continuously, influenced by Social Media. And when I say ‘Social Media’ I mean,
primarily, Facebook. I know of very few people
who use Instagram and Twitter, for example.
I have accounts on the sites LinkedIn and MeetUp, but as little as I use
Social Media at all, I use Facebook far more than the others.
I’ve commented before on my mixed
feelings about Facebook. I think it’s a
great tool for keeping in touch with friends, family and acquaintances,
especially when they are far-flung. For
example, just the other day I happened to learn through Facebook that one of my
nieces and her partner, had moved house.
I see that niece very rarely, and I don’t communicate directly with her. So reading the Facebook post was kind of a
nice thing. Such ‘nice things’ come
frequently on Facebook, when I happen to read about the goings-on of one person
of another.
The down side of Facebook, to me, is
twofold. First, it can be a big time
drain. It can – and often does! – turn into
an obsession, with one wanting to instantly view and offer feedback to posts as
they are put up. This especially, when
one uses the Facebook mobile app and had turned on notifications. That’s the nature of electronic media in
general; because it’s instant, we end up feeling compelled to look instantly
whenever someone pings us, and answer immediately, even at the expense of maintaining
continuity in anything else we might be doing.
Even, say, a face-to-face conversation.
My other gripe with Facebook is that
it does not foster effective two-way communication. Exchanges on Facebook, when they are not
superficial, tend to take on the quality of two ships-of-the-line firing
broadsides at one another. Instead of
engendering effective communications between individuals, Facebook seems to
give people license to attack one another endlessly.
I wonder how much of the kind of
communication we learn from Facebook, spills over into ‘real life.’ Look, not to blame the lack of communication
skills that seems to be pandemic today on Facebook. But I think that any behaviours learned on a
particular media, one into which so many people invest so much of their energies,
have got to spill over into other parts of life. So I’m not out to vilify Facebook – since I
use it myself – but to express caution concerning the habits we learn from it,
and how they affect us generally.
Facebook communication is
instantaneous, but it isn’t conducted in a way that instant feedback, verbal or
otherwise, can pass between parties to a ‘conversation.’ That’s, I think, why the ‘broadside’ quality comes
out: it’s instant and therefore subject
to emotional outbursts, yet there is not instant feedback so it is not subject
to the constraint that most of us practice when speaking face-to-face or even
over the telephone.
SMS exchanges, or ‘texting,’ is
subject to the same limitation. It’s
best left to quick notifications or passing of information that is best
received in durable form – like sending someone an address or phone
number. Look, I hope nobody thinks I’m
the guy in the glass house throwing stones! I am, to be sure, occasionally guilty of all
that I’m describing here. And you may
well be reading this, because I posted a link to my blog on…Facebook! But sometimes I would like to hang Mr.
Zuckerberg by his thumbs from the yardarm…and keel-haul the guy who invented
the SMS.
In the relationship counselling
business, practitioners often use the verb ‘communicate’ and the noun ‘communication’
ad nauseum. Believe me, I’ve sat
through many a class or briefing where it seemed that every third word out of
the presenter’s mouth was one of the two.
But the truth is that so much of positive relationships, requires
effective and empathic communication. And unfortunately, today many of us are
involved in media that simply teach us bad communication skills, rather than
good ones.
There’s surely more to say about
relationships, but I’m now going to move on.
I have talked this week about how relationships should be tools
to help us achieve happiness. So, for
the next week, I’m going to talk about happiness. Shabbat shalom!
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