Technology is destroying our social lives

I’ve been a hardcore user of Facebook for some months now. That sounds like an admission of addiction, and I guess it is, but as any user will understand, it’s become an important tool for my social life.

This has worked very successfully, for a while, but I was naïve to believe that this simple existence could continue, that my sacred Facebook state could remain just that.

One morning last week I checked my page, only to find the appearance of a ‘friend request’- good news one might think. To my horror I discovered that the request was from an acquaintance, who bluntly, I don’t like.

Now suddenly he was asking me to qualify our friendship. He had infiltrated my life, and was now demanding I click the button to say: ‘YES we are now friends. We are contractually obliged to borrow cups of sugar in sweetening emergencies, and discuss our private lives.’

Click YES for friendship

The thought of this scared me. What if he turned up on my door step, demanding a place to sleep for the night basing his proposition on our Facebook friendship? What if he runs out of sugar in the night, and I awake to find him rummaging through my cupboards?

So the conundrum starts here: If I confirm this person as a friend I not only betray myself, but also I let him infiltrate my life. He can see what I say to my friends, he will know what I’m doing tonight, hell- he will even know what I’m doing right now!

On the other hand if I rebut his request, then he will know I don’t like him. Real life awkwardness will be caused by online morality. How dare he test my morals like this?

Needless to say I confirmed him as a friend and tried to forget the incident ever occurred, I’m just as big a coward as I am in real life. However, it did start me thinking.

Is the Internet really helping us to know our fellow man better, or is it just degrading our friendships to a level of sheep throwing and inane emoticons? In the future will we simply select our friends, lovers and even family members by requesting them at the click of a button? It sure would make life easier for us, and that’s what technology does, right?