.
Since the first social network with a global reach, many others have come and conquered legions of users who are highly involved in everything they propose. But a lot has changed since then…
It is not just about networks with different proposals, but how different has also been the behavior of those who participate in them, to the point that many people call them antisocial networks.
The factors that are responsible for this scenario, with negative consequences for everyone, is the focus of our chat.
What is a social network?
We do not intend to answer the question above assuming that someone does not know what a social network is. Everyone knows the answer.
The point is to go a little further and with that begin our analysis of the current scenario.
When one of Google’s designers, the engineer of Turkish origin Orkut Büyükkökten created the network that received his name, its main purpose was to help users find new and old friends and maintain existing relationships.
It was based on the assumption that time and distances, as well as the rhythm of modern life and the big cities, distanced people, reduced contact between them and the many situations of life in common, in short, impaired social interaction. It should just be a tool to rescue a little of what was lost, but without intending to replace face-to-face relationships.
By the way, when analyzing the keywords of the reflection above, we have:
- Socialize – act of inserting a person in society, in social life;
- Living together – the act of living with someone closely, frequently or on a daily basis;
- Life in common – coexistence, cohabitation, sharing intimacy and experiences.
In 2004 and in the early years of Orkut, the world, people socialized, coexisted and led a common life, predominantly face-to-face. As it has been throughout human history.
The network was supposed to do what other technologies that preceded it did. Like the means of transport that helped shorten distances. Then the phone. And finally the Internet, which even before the popularization of Orkut, already offered alternative means, such as MSN Messenger or ICQ.
Until then, nothing had been able to replace the hug, the handshake, eye contact, going to the cinema or to the bar in the company of the most expensive people, parties and meetings with friends and everything else that only face-to-face relationships are capable of providing.
But then, soon the change happened…
The evolution of social networks
The first years of Orkut’s evolution coincided with the reduction in the price of desktops and notebooks, with the increase in the supply of high-speed Internet connections and the emergence of the first smartphones. It was the right scenario for users to experience connectivity 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and with that, open the door to the virtual.
It was the digital transformation in full swing.
In September 2006, Facebook, which until then was exclusively a network of students, would open to the general public and along with it, other services that theoretically had the socialization of people as their premise, were advancing.
People all over the world had options from different social networks to “socialize” with each other and, depending on their choices, resources to exercise this new form of “living together”, which was now digital.
If before on Orkut it was possible to find texts of several hundred words, elaborated by its users and in the communities, one of the “darlings of the time”, Twitter, limited posts of 140 characters.
Emojis, likes, shares on social networks that were presented as an alternative to the pioneering Orkut and the still small cell phone screens, were an invitation for users to “express themselves” making less and less use of the written word.
Why say what was thought about any publication, if a “thumbs up” and an emoji could be understood in the same way? On a friend’s birthday, why think of words that translate emotions and feelings, if an image with a few sayings could be “borrowed” from one of the thousands of profiles that were already part of your personal network?
It was even at some point in this advance, that having several thousand contacts, friends, followers, or whatever the designation used, came to mean status, not exactly social, but digital.
You follow me, I follow you, as does everyone else from my work, my neighborhood, my family, the groups I found interesting, and soon all those people’s friends and friends of friends too. Why not?
And that just reinforced that now with 12982 people on my contact list, it was impossible to write anything to anyone. I give a “thumbs up” to everything everyone posts and when I have time, I send some emojis too. If it is absolutely necessary to write something, I use “internetese”, which abuses neologisms, abbreviations and terms that are now on everyone’s lips – or at their fingertips.
In the meantime, influencers who were partly “born” on blogs, became celebrities and started to become record holders of followers.
That’s when having a lot of likes became the new digital status parameter. He went on to measure how good something is by its number. It was also the birth of antisocial networks, which, just by coincidence, marked the decline and foreshadowed the end of the first major social network – Orkut.
In parallel and in the midst of this rapid evolution, young parents lent or even bought cell phones for their children, who, involved with everything that was in those fascinating and increasingly powerful devices, did not give work and did not ask for their attention.
This generation of small digital natives was born and raised in a new world in which physical and face-to-face experiences were expendable. The virtual was where they got used to “being” and for some even the only way to exist.
The rest of this story still has no end, as it represents today, the moment when, more than ever, they deserve to be called antisocial networks…
Why are networks antisocial?
The summarized evolution that we presented above brings us to the present day and to a very different panorama from the first days.
Just being different in and of itself isn’t necessarily bad. Neither is a return to the past intended.
However, when you look at social networks with a more critical and keen eye, you see once again, just by coincidence, a series of “symptoms”:
- Many young people have enormous difficulty expressing themselves and communicating correctly. When asked to write, they produce texts without punctuation, full of spelling and grammatical errors, or as if they were speaking, after all, everything they routinely do can be replaced by an emoji, a gif, a photo with a ready message, pasteurized, cold and impersonal;
- Sharing killed creativity. You no longer need to create anything. Someone has already been authentic and original for me, just a CTRL+C and CTRL+V, which solves practically anything;
- Books, science and teachers are no longer important. It will always be possible to find one or many groups of experts in what you want to know and who don’t even need to prove anything, just reinforce their convictions about what they believe to be right. Fake news and misinformation is just something for those who think differently than me;
- Behind a screen, a keyboard, hate speech, prejudice and discrimination and everything that is not socially accepted, gain space and people seem unreachable and unpunished for what they do, what they say. And when they are held accountable for their actions, they respond under the allegation of curtailing their most fundamental freedoms;
- Nomophobia and digital addiction have been presented as one of the evils of the 21st century, even being treated as a public health issue in many countries;
- Some of the aspects mentioned so far, as well as others that are not part of the subject, create a dangerous and toxic environment for children, requiring close and efficient parental control in order to preserve their safety and emotional and cognitive integrity;
- Network algorithms have the sole objective of accumulating knowledge about us, whether personal data or behavior, in order to then profit from this knowledge base, even at the expense of our privacy and not infrequently compromising even our security in the digital environment. , as in cases of data leakage;
- They too – the Facebook and Insta algorithms – are increasingly delivering content from people they don’t follow to users, just like TikTok does, information confirmed by Mark Zuckerberg. That is, we are being pushed into a digital life without real-world connections;
- According to a scientific study by the WHO (World Health Organization), psychiatric disorders – such as cases of depression – had a “boom” of 25% due to the COVID-19 pandemic, due to social isolation, reinforcing that the absence of socialization produces negative consequences on individuals. Other studies show that people who live alone are the most affected by depression, corroborating that as the face-to-face interaction decreases, the psychological burden increases;
The above list could be even longer, but it is enough for us to see that the time of real conversations permeated by the exchange of ideas, the ability to listen to each other, reflection and civilized consideration and the ability to put ideas and feelings into words , seems to have stayed in the past.
It is not difficult to understand why they deserve to be called antisocial networks, when people who have much more reason to live harmoniously, break up with each other and isolate themselves in groups and bubbles of true strangers and who are more concerned with being the owners of the truth.
The democratic erosion that we have witnessed is another symptom, since the existence of democracy, among other things, presupposes the coexistence and acceptance of those who think differently.
The same technology that should have the role of bringing us together and facilitating socialization, is the same that actually has been pushing us away from each other.
If on the occasion of the first social network, we were able to reconnect with those old school friends that we hadn’t seen for 10 or 20 years, now because of them, we distance ourselves even from those who are only a few meters away, because all it takes is to send an emoji , or a funny GIF, giving a like and the supposed sensation of contact, satisfies the being that was born for centuries grouping itself in society.
50-year-olds, who behave in the virtual world as if they were 15 and 15-year-olds, as if there wasn’t a real world to be discovered and lived.
All this is not to encourage anyone to abandon social networks, but to discuss and rethink how antisocial we are becoming…
Conclusion
The purpose of social networks was lost in the past. For some time now, they have pushed people further apart and made them antisocial than they have narrowed their relationship.
.
