Essay: What about Social Media?

It was inevitable: after describing in detail the blessings of the Internet (see else where)), I can not escape this anymore.

People who wish to portray themselves through Social Media, breaking it down al the same, must have a healthy opinion about it.

I think this is logical, since this applies to everything in life; you should at least explain why you do something, or rather not.

This applies to our lifestyle, including diet, smoking/drinking behaviors, but also to our social behavior.

We must at all times be accountable, about who we are and how we operate; from this we derive our identity.

Even before we possessed adequate language, we could all produce sounds, and through additional body language we could convey our intentions.

This applies not only to the newborn human, 2012 AC, but also for the very early humans.

We humans differ from animals, in that we have developed speech.

That this has not promoted our mutual communication, I will leave for now; we unfortunately do not all speak the same language.

The central question is - I show my cards directly: why do we communicate? Why do we want to be heard, seen, smelled, tasted, felt, and even excite the sixth sense? What makes us human?

We are not special in this respect: animals have this too, but have no internet.

And there is something else, that animals do not have: the deep-seated human loneliness.

At the risk, that this - for a change - becomes a very short story, I go straight to the heart of the matter.

The human race is - essentially - deeply lonely, and needs others to survive, one man is not a man.

Humans therefore live tribal; this leads back to our method of propagation, bigamy is an invention, dating from before we developed speech.

In addition, we needed - unlike most animals - quickly shelter, and protection from the wild kingdom in the making, around us.

It was not long, before mankind struck back.

In the stone age - we lived in caves, and made tools of stone now - we even hunted mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, though it seems more likely that they hunted us.

In places where this was possible, even elephants, polar bears, bison and other wildlife were outwitted.

To cut a long story short: at some point we were at the top of the food chain.

I do not know exactly where, but somewhere at this moment in our history we went wrong.

It was not long before we discovered the concepts of war; food, women, and cattle, you can easier steal from another, then provide self-facilitation; make slaves of the men, or make them dead.

From here, it's a small step towards the annexation of enemy territory, that spot seems appealing to us. More advanced civilizations, even went by ship to distant destinations, in order to achieve this.

Meanwhile we sit - as a primitive race - in the 21st century.

From guttural sounds and body language, we came by telegraph, telephone, television, teleconferencing smell(?), feel (?), into the ultimate form of communication.

Colonialism we have forfeited, we now have internet access.

We are no longer shipped to a hostile destination, we simply send a malicious virus by e-mail.

The question remains, what about things like MySpace, Facebook, Hyves, Planet-wide Relations, Marketplaces, Twitter, Flickr (clumsy brand, in Dutch), and so forth?

Simple: people are looking for sensory experiences, to allow themselves to see, hear, etc.

We are lonely.
And the larger our world, the more lonely we get.