The importance of social media in family disgregation.

…and phone addiction too

COMMUNICATION

Communication is a process that involves all our senses, when we meet someone we use our senses to acquire useful elements to fully understand the message we are receiving. The posture of our interlocutor, his tone of voice, the way in which he expresses himself and a thousand of other details reveal the true content of the message sent.

If communication takes place only through the voice, useful and important elements to understand it are lost, although the tone of voice reveals emotions, sometime involuntary but valid in favoring a correct dialogue.

If instead the communication (but in this case it would be improper to use this term) happens only with the writing, for example in chat, often misunderstandings that distort the dialogue are triggered and that raise mechanisms of contrast and revenge due to the poverty of this means. Our interpretation of words can be very different from that of the sender and this can generate incommunicability.

Chat communication is much less resources expensive than “de visu” one and therefore is preferred by who wants to establish a dialogue that is poor in attention to the interlocutor (s). It is an expression of willingness of detachment.

A PRACTICAL CASE

A couple at the restaurant comes with two smartphones and two tablets, the first thought is what they will have to say and soon the mystery is revealed: nothing.

Once the orders are made, each of them chats with the smartphone and reads the tablet while waiting for the food to be served. When it arrives the communication restarts talking about the food goodness and then return to nothing in absence of interlocution between the two people. Everywhere, on the street, on public transport, in the parks you can see people smiling lonely
looking at a screen. In restaurants, many do as the couple taken as example and the children are silenced with electronic games instead of having the attention of their parents too busy chatting with someone not in the room.

Brain-damaged, stupid or addicted by the medium, the substance does not change.

ATTENTION

Attention is a limited resource, both in intensity and over time, but someone tend not to consider this limit and abuse it.
The consequence is its progressive limitation which relegates the person to a restricted world where there is no space for external phenomena, interlocution with others included. It then happens to have to deal with people who do not respond to our requests so intent on using their limited attention to chat and extending their little attention to a virtual world that he does not really ask to be known.

BREAKDOWN OF SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS

If this type of behavior is reiterated also in the family, communication, an indispensable factor for obtaining healthy family relationships, degrades to simple agreement on things to do without ever ascending to the necessary understanding of the other.
The family continuous communication is a main need, failure in this disintegrates it; this also happens with other social relationships, which if they are not fed by the lifeblood of communication they don’t take root and die.
As always it is not the wrong means, but the use made of it and the lack of education in the use of this technology.

Exchanging social media for the real world is an aberration, thinking that what happens inside is tangible is madness, expecting a true communication from this poor medium is stupid.

Meeting each other confronting ideas is instead the best choice to do.