.and yours, too..
November 10, 2010 (Wednesday)
A new phenomenon (actually it’s been around for seven years) called “flash mob” has emerged. Through social networking, primarily using the internet, people agree to meet at a certain time and a certain place to do a specific thing. Most of the time it is a meaningless activity, like a pillow fight. Or everyone in the crowd might ooh and aah as if watching fireworks. The possibilities are almost endless. Mostly silly and harmless. Most scenarios are nonpolitical and nonviolent.When it’s over, it’s over. Everyone stops, resumes whatever he/she was doing, and returns to the anonymity of the computer desk. This little dose of interaction seems to be a way to break out of the confinements of our present technological prison. The participants in these “demonstrations” seem to want interaction with others for a few moments, but the rest of the time are confined to their computer screens, communicating only with digital beings somewhere out there in the Ethernet.
A new movie explores the subject of what is now known as “social networking.” People can sit at their own computers and make themselves known to many people whose actual faces they may never have seen. All those in the network become “friends.”
The pace of change has become so rapid that people are experiencing “culture shock.” It is easy to feel out of touch with the world we live in because it is so different from the world of not long ago. An oft-repeated quotation is heard these days: “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto,” meaning we don’t feel like we belong here anymore. Feelings of alienation abound today. Enter the Internet, offering friendships without obligations or responsibilities, in a little thing called, “social networking.”
It is part of our human nature to want family and friends, and to establish relationships that matter. Perhaps the “flash mob” experience supplies some of those basic human needs. Perhaps not.