Here is another concept about Facebook. There has been a lot of discussion about the impact of Facebook and much of it has been bad. I want to cover this from a different angle in this blog.
I bogged before about the "null set" so you can go back to those blogs to review the concept. Here, rather than focusing on the time that kids spend time on Facebook, I want to focus on where the time came from that they are now spending on Facebook. To spend time on something new, you have to stop spending time on something else. We only have so much time and what we do is to shift from one topic to another. If you spend more time on one thing, then you have to spend less time on something else. Is that crystal clear?
Since Facebook is something new, what were we spending time on before? It is not similar to what us humans spent time on for the last few thousand years. It is a very big deal when the human race changes how they had been spending their time for thousands of years. For thousands of years, we communicated between ourselves by speech in a face to face situation. Written language is a very new thing for us humans and it still is a far second place compared to speech and face to face communication. Facebook, on the other hand, is much bigger than reading and gaining on speech and face to face communication.
Think about this. If you are talking with a person face to face, if you were to insult the person in front of you, the person would know who you were. With Facebook, the person being insulted may not know who the person is who was insulting them. The other side is that the person who is doing the insulting can "hide" from the person they are communicating with. This is a very big deal. It is like me with my blog. When you realize how much or what percentage of our communication is with people who we don't know, we are talking about a major social change.
To some extent, as us humans have shifted from rural to an urban society, we have significantly changed how we communicate and what percentage of our time is involved with human to human communication. My guess is that in the last 200 years here in the USA, the amount of our time in social communication has grow by many times. Think about a rural farmer who is out plowing his field or a hunter in the woods compared to a school teacher or office worker today. I am not telling anyone this is either good or bad, but you have to admit that we are talking about a very big change that has occurred in a very very short period of time. Some big things that changed this much in such a short time have to have had a big impact on us humans. We need to think more about exactly what that impact has been and wonder if it has been either good or bad. Based on our conclusions, what do you think that we should do about it? It is not like the weather, us humans are in control and have some responsibility for creating the situation.
Look in the mirror and ask yourself, "What am I "not" doing during the time that I am now on Facebook?" For one thing, we are not getting the physical exercise that we used to. That is one reason that obesity is such a problem. I don't think we are reading as many books as we used to either. That might account for one of the reasons our children's SAT scores have been going down. This shift is a big deal and we should all be thinking about what we can do to moderate the impact!!
I bogged before about the "null set" so you can go back to those blogs to review the concept. Here, rather than focusing on the time that kids spend time on Facebook, I want to focus on where the time came from that they are now spending on Facebook. To spend time on something new, you have to stop spending time on something else. We only have so much time and what we do is to shift from one topic to another. If you spend more time on one thing, then you have to spend less time on something else. Is that crystal clear?
Since Facebook is something new, what were we spending time on before? It is not similar to what us humans spent time on for the last few thousand years. It is a very big deal when the human race changes how they had been spending their time for thousands of years. For thousands of years, we communicated between ourselves by speech in a face to face situation. Written language is a very new thing for us humans and it still is a far second place compared to speech and face to face communication. Facebook, on the other hand, is much bigger than reading and gaining on speech and face to face communication.
Think about this. If you are talking with a person face to face, if you were to insult the person in front of you, the person would know who you were. With Facebook, the person being insulted may not know who the person is who was insulting them. The other side is that the person who is doing the insulting can "hide" from the person they are communicating with. This is a very big deal. It is like me with my blog. When you realize how much or what percentage of our communication is with people who we don't know, we are talking about a major social change.
To some extent, as us humans have shifted from rural to an urban society, we have significantly changed how we communicate and what percentage of our time is involved with human to human communication. My guess is that in the last 200 years here in the USA, the amount of our time in social communication has grow by many times. Think about a rural farmer who is out plowing his field or a hunter in the woods compared to a school teacher or office worker today. I am not telling anyone this is either good or bad, but you have to admit that we are talking about a very big change that has occurred in a very very short period of time. Some big things that changed this much in such a short time have to have had a big impact on us humans. We need to think more about exactly what that impact has been and wonder if it has been either good or bad. Based on our conclusions, what do you think that we should do about it? It is not like the weather, us humans are in control and have some responsibility for creating the situation.
Look in the mirror and ask yourself, "What am I "not" doing during the time that I am now on Facebook?" For one thing, we are not getting the physical exercise that we used to. That is one reason that obesity is such a problem. I don't think we are reading as many books as we used to either. That might account for one of the reasons our children's SAT scores have been going down. This shift is a big deal and we should all be thinking about what we can do to moderate the impact!!
