I agree with Mike that our personal devices are isolating us, though I think that began long before social networking. iPods pretty much ruined the world by encouraging everyone to plug their ears before going out in public, making passing converation impossible. And long before we could post to Facebook from our phones, kids were walking into people while clicking away on handheld video games. In fact, this deterioration started long before either of those culprits, too. It started when watching television started to be perceived as not only an activity, but an activity to be undertaken together. People’s eyes turned away from one another and toward a common focal point, and true interaction fizzled and died.
Yes, you can still converse with a person watching television. You can still converse with a person typing away on a laptop or playing a game on a cell phone, too…you just don’t have their full attention. And they don’t have yours. And that’s been a growing problem in the decades since passive entertainment became the norm.
The thing is, the iPhone isn’t to blame any more than the iPod was, or the Gameboy, or the television set before them. We choose to engage, or not to engage. And it’s important to remember that these devices didn’t drop out of the sky like a mysterious Coke bottle and interfere with the way we lived. They were invented by humans, because humans wanted them.
If we want to engage with our friends and families, we can simply set down the devices, look away from the television and acknowledge the humans in our lives.
[...] teach ‘em. But, the truth is that people who have that many friends may just need to step away from their computer a little more [...]