This week in my communication lecture we were told a story that really stuck a chord with me, it was about a user of Twitter who sent out a series of tweets stating that he was going to end his life. A modern-day suicide note.
Before he tweeted this he tweeted he felt that he didn’t have anyone to turn to which to me I found really upsetting. He was a well-known person with many connections, but still he felt alone. It made me appreciate the fact I have a select few people I can turn to in times where I feel I need someone to talk to, but also made me question many things, such as how many other people are out there feeling the same way as he did? And how many people use social media as a way of gaining that support?
I understand that sometimes people find it hard to talk…my little sister is one of them, and forever I am telling her that a problem shared is a problem halved. But different people use different strategies and hers is also through the use of Twitter, to express her emotions and vent.
I did some further reading and found that “Britain is the loneliest capital in Europe” (The Independent, 2014: Online) . This shocked me at first but when I began to think about it, I began to think about the bigger picture and how things like the mobile phone, have become big parts of our daily lives. I read in the Daily Mail (2013: Online) that the average persons checks their mobile phone around 110 times a day. That to me is astonishing! Why? What is the need? Why do we feel so close to our phones? What are we waiting for?
Nowadays you look around we are surrounded by people buried with their head down engrossed in their mobile phones. We are a generation where people spend more time on-line building ‘relationships’ through cyberspace, than actually being bothered to make the effort and find out about who lives next door. Studying social care I think that this is scary.
The Independent (2013: Online) found the following statistics –
34 million hours are spent on Facebook each day, with a further 28 million hours on Twitter.
And almost a third (30%) of the UK’s 33 million Facebook users are on the network for at least an hour a day, with 13% spending at least two hours on Facebook each day.
More than a quarter (26%) of UK women on Facebook check their pages at least 10 times a day, compared to less than one in five (18%) of men.
Of the UK’s estimated 26 million Twitter users, almost a third (31%) spend more than an hour a day on the network, while 14% – more than 3.6 million people – say their daily usage exceeds two hours.
Personally I think that if we invested more time in our real life friendships and relationships, rather than wasting our time on-line with superficial fake friends and acquaintances, then maybe the levels of loneliness won’t be so high.
Have you ever watched Jeremy Kyle, now forgive me for using it as an example, but how many times do you watch an episode of this and find that Facebook has been the main cause of the argument and relationship breakdown? Yet, so many still waste time on it.
Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that some forms of social media can be helpful, such as the case I mentioned at the beginning. But 9 times out of 10, I would put down the way our generation is so unconnected down to digital technologies and social media.
The video below is an advert illustrating how mobile phones are ruining relationships….
I mean, I can’t say that I haven’t been guilty for overusing my phone but I just think that we need to do something about this, and change the way we are behaving before we end up so engrossed in cyber culture we lose grip of the real world. We seem to be the cause of our own isolation and at this rate we will be the cause of our own extinction if this sort of behaviour carries on……haha.
So next time you pick up your mobile phone THINK!
I am well aware that I have used this post to mainly nag about the use of mobile phones but it wasn’t originally tended for that, but sometimes you just have to roll with the flow and let it out!
References
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/forgot-phone-goes-viral-eight-2224887
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