Social Media makes for an Avoidant Community

Its not just Facebook or Twitter specifically. Its more of the whole digital age where we text, tweet, facebook, share, post. It is a world of fast paced uploading of current emotion like "oh look! I'm angry! Let's tweet about it!" or the mundane "this is what I just ordered for lunch! I even have a photo!" or "exactly where I am right now! Especially for my favourite stalker." It is a world in which we can Add our friends or Block them (if they so very much as make a comment we take offence to, or if we feel that relationship just isn't what we want anymore.) 

We become detached, unaccustomed to the awkward need for great balls to face a problem and SOLVE IT (or at least bleed trying). It is so much easier to delete a friend from a contact list, pretend we didn't see a tweet or block them from all our online social spaces. It is with such elegant simplicity with which we ignore texts we don't feel like responding to (or those we claim we "don't know how to"), or let the phone ring when some EX-fb-friend comes calling. Let's face it. In a world of multi platforms for us to express ourselves, keep in touch with friends and ensure we are always Connected, we are in actuality slowly becoming hardened, superficial, self centred cowardly individuals who dare not even look eyeball-to-eyeball with a Friend and say "hey, we need to talk about something?" OF COURSE we run away! Isn't it? We spare ourselves the awkward silence, the uncertainty of how the other responses to confrontation. We flee feelings of discomfort since our fingers can do all the talking/clicking for us by deleting, blocking. For a community that increasingly vomits tweets and facebook posts by the millisecond, we often become SO inarticulate. Maybe it is because twitter gives u a meagre 140 Characters? Is that now the attention span of the brain capacity?

While we are presented with technology that serves as amazing tools placed in the hands of a craftsman, we need to ensure that these platforms are the tools we use to shape an outcome, rather than us being tools, unconsciously shaped by the tools we so hold and use. Instead of smiling politely to all your Followers and Friends then ranting in spurts of vulgarities because you only have a 140 characters to inarticulate yourself, learn to verbalise once more with your God-given vocal chords.If you have an issue, SPEAK UP. If you represent a cause, DECLARE IT. If you have something to say, SAY IT. (Of course it is preferred that your thought process surpasses the 140 Character limit and passes through your brain first. As much as we all LOVE to tweet, I assume we have much more than the brain of a bird.)

SO! Lovely avoident community we are all in the process of becoming, lets try to at least slow down that cart en route to downhill-dom shall we?