my life

I keep hearing that human beings have never been more connected than we are today. If that is really the case then why do I feel so disconnected?

We hear about the multitude of online communities, but when was the last time anyone from these online communities took out your bins out on a Sunday night or collected a parcel for you when you were out for the day?

When I was growing up, everyone knew pretty much everyone else in the place where we lived. This wasn’t the Home Counties in the 1950s where I can imagine old men tipping their hats was a regular occurrence. No, this was the 1980s and this was a village-cum-council estate outside Hull. But there was a community of sorts and it was a nice place to grow up.

A few months ago I had 750+ friends on Facebook. I had met every single one of these people face-to-face at one time or another in my life. Old friends from school (I say friends, I didn’t have that many so in reality they tended to be people I just shared a classroom with), friends from my travels around the many countries I have visited, friends from university and more recently the friends that I have made whilst living in New Zealand.

I made a decision over Christmas to have a cull. I had come to the conclusion that, quite frankly, if Lee Wilkinson (it could be anyone, Lee, if by odd chance you’re reading this) were to wander over to me in the street and offer me the opportunity to spend ten minutes looking at photos of him and his mates paint balling somewhere in South Yorkshire, or his third child’s Christening at a Church in Aldbrough, I would almost definitely decline his offer, if I even recognised this man in the first place.

So why do I find myself spending hours and hours doing exactly that, only to momentarily wake from this Facebook-induced zombie-like state wondering where the last hour of my life has gone to, never to be seen or heard from again? I decided to get rid of all these people who, to be quite frank, I don’t give a shit about.

But this got me thinking about all the people that I do give a shit about: there’s me thinking that sites like Facebook have given me the opportunity to keep in touch with all these people who I do value in my life and who I would happily sit down with over a cup of tea to look at their holiday snaps. I realised that these people are not connecting with me at all, and the likelihood is that I’m not connecting with them either.

These online communities, even the ones containing real people who would take out your bins given the opportunity, are not communities connecting real people. They’re communities alright, but they only connect our facias together. They connect our egos; ‘Cool Gav’ to ‘Successful Dave’ – they keep you up to date with ‘Fun Gav, who never has a bad day and when he does it’s almost surely going to be lived and laughed at in an ironic way’.

We’re all a part of our own reality TV show and to say we’re more connected now is just not true. We’re certainly more contactable, but contactable is not the same as connected. Right, I’m off to take Gill’s bins out!