A friend of mine met a girl in whom he was interested. They exchanged information which included email addresses and Facebook accounts. Even though they are Facebook friends, my friend said that he is happy that they use email to communicate instead of Facebook. He said that email seems for more personal than Facebook.
Email is more personal than Facebook.
That statement is amazing to me. Not because I disagree with my friend but because it is so true. The levels of intimacy we feel through different media are changing in our ever-expanding world of communication and social networking.
15 years ago when I got my first email address, Scootr2000@aol.com, email was one of the least intimate and most impersonal forms of communication. It was text on a screen sent through the Internet. It didn’t have the intimacy of a phone call and it definitely lacked the personal nature of a hand-written note.
The intimacy of a phone call, though, would be a foreign concept to someone from the early 20th century. How could just the sound of someone’s voice be considered intimate? Holding onto a receiver, speaking into a microphone and having one’s voice conducted across wires could hardly be considered intimate. For our friend from the early 20th century, intimacy would have meant a face-to-face conversation where one wasn’t only heard but also seen.
Our forms of communication and interaction are changing rapidly. Our definition of intimacy is changing almost as rapidly. Each new form of communication removes us one step from actual human interaction. Written language was the first step away from face-to-face interaction and now it seems like we’re taking another step every day. Each day there’s a new app, a new website or a new form of social networking. Each step we take moves us further away from face-to-face interaction but it also raises the intimacy level of the previous step.
We’ve reached the point where we know an email isn’t as personal as a phone call but it’s definitely more intimate than a tweet. Who knows how long it will take until we’re venerating the intimacy of a tweet over whatever the next step in communication technology will be?
Regardless of how many steps we take, though, we need to remember that God created us to be in relationships. Those relationships are at their best and most intimate when conducted face-to-face. Social media provide a good way to connect with people but they can never replace face-to-face interaction with an actual human being. God wired us to need that kind of interaction and no amount of social media can ever replace it.
So call, tweet, text, post, email, comment and LinkIn to your heart’s content. Just recognize the number of steps you’ve taken away from face-to-face interaction and make an effort to get back there on a regular basis.
How do social media complement your face-to-face interactions?
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