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7/08/10

The End Of The Social Norm

The days of smartphones and mobile computing is leading to the dissolve of the human contact.

Let's take the phone for example. We went from having a device that was installed in every home and voicemails linked us to the missed call from Uncle Joe from New York. It is crazy to believe that I have witnessed the total transformation of technology, but not embraced it, but made it part of my everyday life. I remember my first cell phone - It was a slim brick that had a monochrome screen with numbers - that's it. I later got a phone with SMS that made stupid conversations during school make the day go by quicker. Now I've moved to the iPhone. I have my music, my calender, all my emails, the web, apps for days - WTF this thing MOVED the future to us very quickly. Now with all this technology is it actually helping us. It seems that my minutes dry up at the end of the month from non-usage and texting is just the norm. But I feel the disconnect from my youth as my mouth is no longer the motivator of conversation and more my fingers and thumbs. I almost feel this is a very bad thing. In no way do I want to live in a world that we have a digital life and a 'real' life. I'm starting to ponder the idea of using this platform of mobile technology to make us meet people in real person and have that conversation. Anti-Social has be making a come back. I thought it was only a thing that those kids that wore black all the time had a symptom of.

Let's take a look at the Social Circles - it started with MySpace. It was cool. Custom pages, sharing pictures, and seeing how many people were your friends. Now, Facebook is like the gateway to the Digital Prom and if your not there - your not it. I use Facebook to a point. It scares me that so many people are willing to trust one sole network to handle all their personal information. People make fun of me for back peddling my status updates weekly - but if someone wanted to look up my dirt in the workforce. It's just sitting there. No matter how you look at Facebook's privacy settings - other people will talk of your drunkenness at tomorrow's staff meeting.

This is all a lead up to the disconnect that technology has given us because no one wants to make life 'real'ly social. I don't want to see 10 years down the road where I have to be connected to the Internet to go through with my daily life. At the rate were going - I might be joining a tribe in West Africa that has no idea what the Internet is.

Just a suggestion - if your reading this, go outside and enjoy the air. It misses you.

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