little white truths

I don't know when it became normal to learn about the engagements/pregnancies/career changes/#[insert major life events] of your friends on Facebook. But it did.

I find myself going to functions sometimes and seeing friends whom I haven't seen for a while and losing the ability to deliver/hear news in person. As in, 'So how are you? Hang on, I already know. You had a shit day at work today and you spent last week setting up the kids' treehouse, and you're about to start renovations.'

What's left to say?

The internet is changing how we speak and what we speak about. Because we're entering conversations with more information than we once had.

This blogging thing I'm doing is shifting things as well. Friends have told me that reading my blog has become a bit like voyeurism. Like they're learning things about me and my life that they're not really meant to know. I totally get that. I have friends with blogs too, and I've felt the same. One of my newer friends has a blog, and when we first met she told me about it and I started reading it before I really knew her. It was strange, kind of like internet dating. I knew a lot about her before we'd even sat down for coffee.

The internet is changing our perceptions of others. Our understanding of them. Whether it's from reading their blogs, Facebook posts/comments or posts on Twitter, we're seeing a different side of them that we perhaps never saw before. I know people who are totally different on Facebook, who are shy in 'real-life' but vocal online. Some old acquaintances whom I once thought I had little in common with or perhaps never really knew, now write posts that I relate to more than posts by the people in my life. I comment on their posts (as they do mine) more than many others. What does this mean for my friendships? Are they undergoing some kind of disconnection without my even realising it?

And what about this concept of 'real-life'? Is real-life still 3D or is it now on-screen? What a scary thought. For the people whose online personalities are quite different to their in-person ones, who's the real person? Did I never know the real person before and am I only meeting them now?

As for Google. I was at dinner with some friends last week and they were talking about how the ability to Google questions as they come up is changing the way they think. As in, 'Who was that actor from Nebraska? Let's Google it.' 'Have you ever wondered where seagulls go in winter? Google will know.'

I've been thinking about this and it's true. Before the internet, our minds were left to wander and seek the answers to questions we often couldn't hope to answer unless we went to a library or called someone who might know. So our minds were allowed to go on their own courses and think in different directions. And for the answers we knew but couldn't quite place, we had to think about them for a while before they came to us. Now, the answers are on hand. Our brains needn't move.

Are we doing our minds an injustice? Is Google destroying some part of our imaginations because we're not letting them roam free? How many people actually go to libraries anymore, when we can sit at home or in a café with a ready-reference at our fingertips? Are we forgetting how to solve problems laterally and flex our mind muscles because it's easier and now habit to simply open the search panel and type in our requests?

This is making me think of the discussions that occasionally arise about how sending texts from mobile phones has changed our language. Who used the word 'tomoz' before the arrival of the text? I'd say social media is the same. I see well-educated people writing posts and comments with bad grammar and a complete lack of punctuation. Unintentional spelling errors are one thing. Deliberately dispensing with necessary capitals quite another. And at what point will lazy language become the norm, so that we find ourselves struggling to write correctly at work, because the 'typing memory' in our fingers has become programmed to write 'How R U', 'Wot U doin tomoz'?

I wonder sometimes whether the internet is changing how I write. My blog articles are written and then posted almost straight away, without the usual 'leave for a few days and then re-draft/edit' process that my magazine articles, for example, undergo. Blogging 'experts' (yes, they apparently exist) say that's exactly how blog posts should be done - written well but posted straight away, then on to the next one. It's all about volume, they say. But is this 'that'll do' approach a form of laziness too?

Or is it simply part of this dark immediacy of our times? This desperate urgency, eternal rush.

Feel something? Post it on Facebook before it has time to settle. Need something? Find and buy it within half an hour online, rather than going through the process of searching for it in stores. Have something to say? Write it in one letter rather than three, because 'u' and 'you' really do mean exactly the same thing and it just takes so much damn effort to type those extra two letters. Need an answer? Go to gospel Google, rather than using your brain. Afterall, who can be bothered. Why do it in ten minutes when you can do it in two. Who cares about value or quality when urgency is at stake. What a waste of time.

That's just it, isn't it?

What a waste of time.