Yes, I guess this has become less about social skills questions a more a debate about modern communication. I read these replies this morning before going to work, and on the way there I had a big realization. I'm right on the line of a generational gap, and since communication has changed so dramatically so quickly, communication between the two generations has degraded to the point where they live in separate internal universes. The rules of what is normal and what is acceptable are not just different, as they are between any 2 generations. It's so different as to be nearly impossible to reconcile.
I was born in 1985 and I am, by age, part of the generation "Y" (one of its older members). However, as a child, I never associated with other children. My friends were always far older than me - usually teachers and other adults - and their culture is the one I grew up feeling was my own.
So here's the older generation. Generation X, I guess, and what I'm trying to describe goes even deeper for the Boomers and older folks. All of these people grew up at a time when your personal information was YOURS. It wasn't simply that no one was allowed to take it without asking you, or that it was impossible to "research" someone the way you can easily do with a Google search these days. It was also that you didn't WANT to give out that information. What you thought, how you felt, what your opinions were, what you did in your spare time, these things were all YOURS. You could choose to share them with whomever you wished, or you could choose to keep it to yourself. If you wanted to get to know someone, you had to EARN that from them somehow. You had to talk to them, and persuade them to trust you enough to open up to them (which meant you had to learn some serious social skills and learn to deal with anxiety and other issues that only exist in face-to-face contact). Personal relationships were valuable and something to be proud of. It was worth writing a letter and paying to put a stamp on it to keep in touch with a friend who had moved away. Saying someone was your friend always MEANT something, something deep that everyone understood.
Fast forward to the younger part of generation Y, starting with those who are in college now. These kids mostly grew up with the internet. By the time they were teenagers, Facebook was already pretty ubiquitous. There was never any of this feeling of your personal information being sacred and treasured. There was a web site sitting right there, something everyone else was already using, asking you what you were doing or thinking or feeling right that second. You typed it in, with a guaranteed audience, and you got your first Like. It was a good feeling. That's the standard that these people have grown up with. You get a Facebook account and you enter every possible detail of personal information, because that's how your new friends will find you. That's how people will get to know you. Most people don't even stop to think about why they're entering the list of every movie they've ever seen and whether they thought it was good. It's just what you do. It's what everyone does. It's fun to go to other people's pages and see what movies they like. You can find new friends that way, by common interests. And why *wouldn't* you want everyone to be able to know everything about you? The idea has never really been suggested to most of them that there should be any reason to keep your personal information to yourself, and share it with only a select few. They never went through life having to work to get to know someone, and knowing how it feels to succeed and develop a friendship the hard way.
As I said, I'm on the line. When I was a kid, there was no personal internet. I grew up and learned my social skills during a time when if you wanted to know someone, you had to walk up to their face and get to know them. It was difficult, especially for me (being autistic and undiagnosed), but when I succeeded, that was something to be proud of. I had three friends in high school. Three. Those relationships were significant. Those people were real. They were there, standing in front of me, asking to copy my homework, or trying to persuade me to join the marching band, or passing notes in class, or going hiking in the woods and climbing trees, or having sleepovers. If I wanted to talk to them and they weren't there, I had to stand in the kitchen where everyone in the house could hear me, call their house, and hope that they were home to answer. Communication was a valuable commodity, and so communicating was a significant act, one that made a tangible difference in my life every time I did it. Secrets were even more valuable, because there was no readily available way to transmit them without meeting up behind a tree and making sure no one was listening. Being entrusted with a secret felt like being entrusted with someone's very life.
That feeling has never left me. It's what I grew up with. I can say with absolute conviction that over the course of my entire life, comparing all the friendships I've ever had, including the real-life ones with people who don't use the internet much as well as the online ones with people with all the same interests as me, the real-life ones are always more fulfilling by a landslide. Even if you share every detail of your life with someone you met online, discuss and debate everything, even talk each other out of suicide when you're depressed, and even if you meet each other in real life and become meatspace friends, it's never even remotely the same.
Facebook came out when I was in university. I heard about it and laughed at the idea. You sign up for a web site, type in all your personal information, and people can just look at it and know all about you, without even ever talking to you? RIDICULOUS! It sounded like some kind of bad joke. But inevitably, a few people talked me into giving it a try. They pointed out that you could find study partners on it, and join university groups you might otherwise not know about (keeping in mind that it was college-only at the time). They promised me that it was really private. You had to have a uni email address to sign up, and no one could look at your profile without your permission. I gave in.
Fast forward to a few months ago when I realized with horror that the things I had posted back in those private university days had become automatically public when Facebook switched over to being a public site.
I want to go back to having control over my personal information. I want to go back to that part of my life where being friends with someone and getting to know them was a significant thing. I can't do that as long as I'm on Facebook, because it has become impossible.
So I see the responses to what I've written on here, and they make a lot of sense when I remember that according to the age poll that was popular recently, most of the people on this site are teenagers. Most of you guys grew up with it being completely normal to share your personal information with everyone. When I say I don't want Facebook tracking my location, don't want people tagging me in photos, etc, you can't understand why I would be so against it. It's not like anything BAD is being done with that information.
Several of you have told me that it's relatively simple to cull my friends list and change some settings so I get minimum annoyance. But that in itself is a lot of work, especially when you've had an account on there since 2006 and things have piled up pretty badly. And what is not communicating very well here seems to be that I don't think I should HAVE to do any work to keep my information to myself and to keep my annoyance down. That information is mine, by birthright, by default. My time is valuable. My friendship is valuable. I want it to be true again that if someone says they know all about me, it means they've earned my trust enough (or at least done enough real-life stalking) to learn about me. I'm happier when I have control over my information. That info is my life. It's me. If someone wants it, they should have to ask. I want it all to really MEAN something again. And that is still possible - as long as I'm not on Facebook.
I remember as a kid, adults would write books and films depicting dystopian futures where everyone was being tracked all the time. Everyone had to register, their location always tracked, their activities always monitored. That was a serious horror theme back then. But what no one ever stopped to consider was that when an entire generation grows up with those things being normal, they don't have any problem with it. It stops being a horror show and starts being mundane reality.
And before anyone gets upset and yells at me, I'm well aware that not everyone is one extreme or the other. My mother uses Facebook quite a lot. My grandparents have finally started using it, though they only use it to send messages to grandkids and look at pictures, and they post their own long, ranty laments about what the world is coming to. Plenty of young people really do only use Facebook to keep in touch with a few people. But it is definitely the exception rather than the rule, and its getting harder and harder to do. A huge paradigm shift has occurred. It is now not only acceptable, but normal and expected that personal information is public. People who have grown up with that generally don't seem to have a problem with it. People who didn't, generally do.
And yes, I think that Facebook can be a useful tool, but in order to use it these days you have to sacrifice a lot of control and do a lot of extra work to keep it from being a chore. I'm just not willing anymore.
I'm in the genearational gap, but I can't bridge it. All I can do is choose my side. I'm going with the side that's proven to give me better life satisfaction and more happiness.
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Topic: Modern Social Skills Questions (Read 3351 times)