With the blink of an eye, we’re already halfway through 2018. As the past couple of months flew by with traveling and reunions, I gradually recognize how my complicated relationship with social media is shaping my existence as a human being the age of internet. As much as I love how social media keeps me and my distant friends—especially those from different continents and time zones—connected, I do not like the part when it tries to mimic and take over real human interactions—not that I think it ever will.
I imagined, what if Facebook or Instagram went away completely? How will it affect me? How will it change my daily life? This imagination first scared me: what about all the ‘friends’ I have? Yet, as I plunged into this train of thought, I realized that without online social chatter and distractions, I could concentrate better with more time to make things really happen in life, whether it be actually hanging out with friends, or spending time with myself like painting, reading or writing.
In April, I visited Denver CO and spent a few days with my friend Christy, with whom I met during work training about a year ago. In May, I visited my high school friend Jessica in Boston MA, and we’ve probably only seen each other once a year on average after we went off to college. Two weekends ago, my roommate from my semester exchange at the University of Hong Kong came to Washington DC. For the past one and half year, we’ve probably only texted each other three times. Yet, we spent a whole day catching up. Not all friendships survive reunions. It made me more than grateful for these relationships that I’ve came to build through genuine in-person.
Face-to-face conversation is more than just talking: it is looking into the other person’s eyes, communicating through body language, feeling the rise of body temperature as your conversation gets heated, and sharing the same air, space and moments of each person’s life.
On the other hand, interacting with people through technology, is just interacting with a device. Digitalization gave us the access and ability to create more resources, but a typed email is not equivalent to a written letter, just like a snapped photo on your phone is no longer as precious as a physical picture that you may frame. When I receive postcards traveling across the world, even if they only carry a few sentences, I feel so much joy that a typed message will never deliver. Just like reunions are occasions made special, these objects also carry efforts and meanings, which we’re slowly losing today as our life move forward with technology.
Technology is so integrated into our lives nowadays. From day to night, we are always plugged in. Honestly, we cannot live without it. However, we can choose how we want it to be part of our life. Just like social media, we can decide how we want to use it, instead of letting it control us.
The overflowing of data we create nowadays and the heavy interaction with devices dull our senses and sensibilities. Life on earth are all interconnected, and there’s something great about human beings, that’s more than our rationality could make sense of. We always have a piece of nature in us, more than a piece of us have in nature. I think unplugging is very important to stay alert and aware of our natural world in the age of Internet.
I love this quote: “all reality is interaction,” said by an Italian theoretical physicist philosopher and writer, Bravo Rovelli, the man who makes physics sexy, according to the Times. In his words, “reality is a network of granular events; the dynamic which connects them is probabilistic, between one event and another, space, time matter and energy melt in a cloud of probability.”
How beautiful is that!
The second you are not facing the screens, the second you are interacting with live creatures on earth, you step into others’ reality, you became part of their space, time matter, and energy.
Try it!