Colon and parenthesis instead of a smile

Facebookaholism and social networking addiction – such terms have recently appeared in scientific psychology journals. Social networking is like a drug. This is not an exaggeration, it stimulated the same parts of the brain as cocaine. Besides being online most of the day, the addicted to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinedIn, Flickr etc. in extreme cases, once back home spend their free time in front of the monitor checking and updating their status instead of talking to their family.

Facebook’s trick lies in the fact that people love feedback. They want to satisfy their ego and know what arouses interest and provokes comments. So every now and then we check to see if anyone liked our uploaded photo or retweeted our message. Social networking has changed the social relations language. Being extroverted and gaining attention is to “share” and clicking means socializing. In the world of the internet there are no introverts.

However, there is one essential danger, which affects all users of electronic communication – that is the email and text messages as well – it is stripped of the emotional dimension. Talking face to face can be embarrassing, ambiguous, awkward, and by sending a text message you can avoid all these unpleasant feelings. Emoticons – smiley face, thumb up, winking – replace a whole range of emotions that personal encounter raises. The danger is that we unlearn to deal with emotions. We hide behind the computer and instead type in the colon and parenthesis.

There is still little research on the impact of social networks on family relationships and friendship. Facebook has been up and running for eight years, the thumbs up icon appeared only one and half years ago! It’s hard to tell whether social networking made our friendships closer or not. Surely having your marital quarrel online doesn’t help, but on the other hand, marriage thanks to Facebook is already a fact.