Meg’s rant!Loaded Aug 18th 2010
Posted by Meg Daintith
There have been some excellent commentaries around the impact of social media on our society published recently. One such article by The Guardian’s Tom Meltzer is particularly stimulating:- http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/aug/07/social-networking-friends-lonely. Tom uses a quote in this article that struck a chord with me – I’ll come to this in a moment.
Save to say as a result, I am having a bit of a vent, if you don’t mind, to those people who say, “I haven’t got time for all that Twitter and Face-book rubbish, those people need to just get a life!”. How many times have you heard this? Grrrrr.
To me, this is the worst kind of status update – that designed to make others feel inadequate. For many social media status updates read: “my life is better than yours”. But criticism from those not even taking part in social media is surely worse. They don’t even acknowledge they are playing the “my life is better than yours”game by doing others down. But that’s exactly what this is about.
Tom Meltzer quotes from When The Lonely Society? by Dr Mike Shooter of the Mental Health Foundation, who said “There is no sadder sight than a … person left isolated ….. feeling miserable and picked on by those who may have similar self-doubts but who cover them up by shunning those who seem weaker than themselves.” This quote sums up the smugness of the ‘get a life’ brigade.
Not only that, but such pride in the abandonment of technology is just plain irritating. Let me guess, it wasn’t like that in your day, kids don’t know they’re born and a back-hander from your dad never did you any harm. Rant over!
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