Even though social media allows people to feel closer to their friends and relatives, communication has never had such a gap in all of mankind’s history. We have more digital connections than ever, but we have never been as disconnected among humans.

Digital relationships are an illusion

Being close to someone means much more than simply sharing moments through an image or a thought – it means being actually close (physically) sharing the same space, interacting with non verbal gestures, being able to reply immediately with either short expressions or taking the turn to talk.

While social networks cut the distance gap, they tend to miss many of the emergent attributes and behaviors that turn a conversation into a cozy chat, or that allows a simple idea to turn into a whole organic discourse.

Lack of depth

The first problem is the incapability to transmit a whole ordeal of ideas or concepts thoroughly – even some social networks like twitter reduce the allowed size for any published text, reducing the capacity to relay bigger ideas.

Some people would think that social networks are made for that, to transmit quickly – we immediately think of memetics proposed by Richard Dawkins, where a simple unit can convey a lot of information, but the problem is that information only gets understood properly if the context is known – a commonly observed social behavior with internet memes and their archetypes.

Some other social networks are made with that purpose in mind, like tumblr, which allows not only to share text, but also video, images and such – but the mostly used networks right now are reel or video based (tiktok and youtube), image based (instagram and snapchat) or text based (twitter and facebook), making depth difficult to achieve.

Most people wouldn’t worry about this, as for that purpose we have blogs and books, but taking into account the average time spent per day into social networks with short formats, we can understand that the human mind is getting shaped for receiving short stimulus, becoming unable to appreciate longer formats – a phenomenon that is already present and widely observable.

Non verbal communication

Most digital communications lack the non verbal communication completely – even in the video based ones you can’t actually see much of the person’s body, so non-verbal expressions become limited.

Though not regarded as such, this type of communication is essential to achieve good communication – missing it in text based social networks is a negative ordeal for society, as even if people agree on something it could seem the opposite – many good friends stopped being so because of this while discussing hot topics like politics.

Non verbal communication is so important that most professional lecturers know that a great deal of their presentations rely on how they look and how they use their bodies. Lacking this level makes communications prone to failure.

Most people read their messages limited to their metareality, meaning if the person is upset while reading a term of endearment could pass as the other person trying to humiliate him, for example. Most of that confusion could be solved easily by talking in person instead of discussing through the networks.

Out of rhythm

The most commonly used social networks out there work mostly in asynchronous mode. A person leaves a message and waits for someone to read it and then reply, starting an interaction or conversation. Well, that’s not really how it happens, as most of the communication – besides being shallow – does not feel natural at all, at least not for us old timers.

Real, deep communication implies a lot more than expressing ideas and consenting or dissenting to them – it means being able to transmit concepts with rhythm, and being able to reply with it as well.

Writing, waiting, then taking the time to think about the answer, then writing while the other person is waiting is totally counterproductive to a real thorough communication. It’s like listening to music in separate parts and broken up – communications should have a rhythm between interlocutors, as well.

Data centralization

Even if they call themselves “social networks” they are not networks as such, they can’t connect a facebook with a snapchat user, for example. These so-called networks are actually just big boxes that hold all of our precious information inside, and if they decide to erase it one day, they will.

Another big problem with data is that sometimes a streak of brilliant inspiration happens on a closed group on a specific social network, and thus can’t be easily shared to other digital spaces because it is enclosed on a specific company infrastructure.

This data centralization not only makes ideology distribution limited to contained and controlled spaces where freedom of speech can be limited easily by auto banning algorithms, but also makes it difficult to spread easily.

The solitude of digitality

While it would seem that most people are connected to each other while on their devices, we have actually created a society that relies on loneliness and solitude to thrive – we call them ‘social networks’ but see a group of kids having lunch together but everyone is stuck to their mobiles.

It would seem that society is losing the ability to enjoy other people’s physical company and even losing our attention to anything else. Who hasn’t seen a bunch of persons walking in the street barely paying attention to anything beyond their mobile screens?

By creating social networks we have actually created a digital desert, a place where people are disconnected from each other even if we are sitting right besides each other – this digital desert is actually taking away our ability and desire to interact beyond a digital screen, endangering humanity as such by limiting the capacity of ideas that we can transmit effectively over the networks.

We are all boxed away in our confinements believing that we are living our lives because we are connected to a network via a small screen. We need to snap out of it soon!

Human collaboration

Human evolution has depended on society as such – a single goal and collaboration to work towards it are the basic blocks of civilization as we know it. By paying more attention to only the individual, we miss our ability to join efforts and build something bigger than ourselves – even the social network companies are so, a bunch of people gathered around the mission to create something bigger than any of them, including their conceptual and digital creator.

Of course we also need to recognize individuality – we are not robots from a production line, and every person has different skills and attributes that can allow him or her to fit in different ways into society, making his or her existence purposeful, but we also need to retake the concept of enjoying company, working together and listening and communicating our most important ideas in person.

If we stop human collaboration and the pleasure of treating each other in person, we are missing the opportunity to use these new technologies in such ways that will allow us to thrive, but until we have decentralized and REAL social networks, that’s a difficult goal to achieve.

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