Since a couple of months, our niece is staying with us. It has been a nice having her as she is a very sociable and upbeat, full of energies young woman.
At age of twenty, she is very focused and determined to achieve something good in her life. She lives with her family in a small town a couple of hours of bus from Kathmandu and she came here to study and work.
She dreams to study nursing and also to go overseas and currently she is working very hard teaching in two schools to save as much money as possible.
There is one thing though that made me a bit upset with her and this is the time she spends on Facebook every evening after dinner.
It is true that everybody has the freedom to relax in whatever preferred way after a very heavy day: there are people who stayed glued to the TV, others like me who spend time reading the newspapers or checking internet and well there are persons who love spending hours chatting on Facebook.
I am a bit old fashioned and a bit anti-modernism: I was among my friends the latest one to get a mobile ( the fact that my current mobile is a stone aged NOKIA can tell you something on this), I do not have a personal Facebook but I used it often for work.
Therefore I am not totally a radical guy, let’ say I am a kind of pragmatic fellow who understands that Facebook can be sometimes useful.
Forget that I was particularly happy when the Supreme Court of India blocked the Facebook’s attempt to penetrate the country by offering free use of internet that exclusively limited to its and few other web sites.
Forget that recently there was the news that Facebook have a say in the news that you read while scrolling your account, basically determining what you are going to read, choosing which articles you are going to see in your personal page.
As I said before I am a pragmatic and I do not really despised Facebook: I simply believe that is possible to have a private life, an enriching network of friends also without Facebook while making a smart use of it at personal and professional level.
And here we go back to my nice. Besides telling her few times ( well actually more than that) not to spend so much time on Facebook, I also tried to understand better the reasons for which she was actually giving so much time to the thing.
The answer I got from her was very interesting and enlightening: she told me she spends a lot of time on Facebook because she does not have friends in town and that through Facebook, she came to know many friends.
When she mentioned the word “friends”, I started being more intrigued and I kept asking her which kind of friends, if they were real and genuine peers or just persons she would call “friends” but she would never ever shared with them many of her personal things.
Interesting she explained me that among a bunch of people who are not at all real friends, she found quite a few genuine persons, persons that often time she never met but with whom she often speaks on the phone.
Some of them are in Nepal, some others live overseas but all are now trusted persons that she came to know gradually and she now really considers them as real and genuine friends.
In short Facebook can be an amazing tool for so many things, including creating a network of friends but here I have also a worry: while it is great to make friends on line (despite you need to be extra careful on whom you are really chatting with), we should not forget other, more mainstream ways to connect with others and making new friendships.
Otherwise we are going to lose real, face to face “social-ability” with only chat to chat, virtual version of it.
You can spend hours chatting and connecting with friends far away while being on Facebook but this should not block or prevent you from getting outside there and socialize and be open to new connections you might find at work or at school.
Often time we shape our way of being by being in touch with others. Just imagine an individualistic society where you only connect and make friends through advanced technologies. If you think well, because of e-mailing and texting, we have far less interactions with others. Oftentimes instead of making a simple call, we keep interacting the longer way, by texting and this is something myself I have to work on.
So let’s make Facebook and other likeminded social media a facilitator rather than entrusting them with the monopoly over the way we interact and socialize.
While these media are often empowering, in this case, they represent instead a dangerous threat on the way we live our lives.
Let’s not forget that ultimately we are the ones in charge and, with a good dose of self control, we can make the best out of social media while enjoying real life. Yes out there.
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