Friendship Just a Click Away

As a teenager in France, Louis Borel, who now tutors French and Spanish in the Tutorial Center, never imagined that he would one day cross oceans to come to America. It was simply impossible. Borel grew up with life before the automatic phone, when a flight from France to Germany took 14 hours instead of the 50 minutes it takes today, and when radio and music were luxuries.

The characteristics of life in the 21st century, with its consumerism, high-tech grandeur and exhaustingly fast pace, existed in the past only as “science fiction,” and for Borel they were figments of his wildest imaginations.

Borel, after all, lived in a Europe torn apart by World War II. He and many of his peers still remained strikingly naïve and uninformed compared to teenagers of today because communication was laggard and sparse.

“There was hardly radio, music, no nothing,” Borel said. “Only mail, and that traveled by boat. We had very little communication and we were very ignorant of what was happening around us— the world at that time was still a big place.”

The revolution of communication, most notably social networking, has created lifestyles, possibilities and ideals that teenagers during Borel’s era would have thought unbelievable.

Our generation is the first to truly grow up with social networking, which has effortlessly entwined itself into our lives by both displacing and supplementing traditional modes of communication such as mail, telephone and face-to-face interaction.

“[Students] use social networking to add more dimension to their interactions as opposed to taking away the face-to-face interactions,” Egan Junior high School counselor Bruce McClain said. “Whenever the opportunity presents itself [teenagers are still] able to connect face-to-face.”

And as the generation of the 21st century, we grew up taking for granted the ease with which we can talk to whomever we want, whenever we want. Old barriers such as geographical constraints are now obsolete. As junior Alejandra Reules puts it, she’s “always updating how [she’s] feeling, what [she’s] doing.”

And while many protest the growth of social networking as shallow or superficial, they cannot deny that spending a seemingly absurd amount of time staring at a computer screen is now simply a fact of life. It’s simply too easy to lose ourselves in the interminable waves while surfing the world wide web.

“I definitely lose track of time while I’m online,” senior Olivia Hunter said. “It’s easy to get distracted, and I spend about four to five hours online daily. A lot of the time I stay on my computer until about one or two in the morning.”

Olivia’s situation reflects that of most other teenagers, who spend an average of 1.4 hours on Facebook a night, according to a poll conducted by The Talon.

Why do we dedicate so much of our time chatting and looking things up on the net?

Because it’s so efficient, so accessible, so fast—a reflection of our generation’s love of instant gratification and the value we place on our time. In many ways, we’re evolutionarily hard-wired to love social networking.

“We are innately, biologically social beings,” McClain said. “Human beings find other human beings just innately fascinating.”

The phenomenon of social networking, which from the outside seems so peculiar (people don’t call just to say that it is raining or they hate American cars, so why do they share online?), isn’t just another form of communication.

It’s something never before seen; it’s a chance intersection between limitless technology and the human spirit. We don’t just use networking to make new contacts and stay in contact. We network to chat, to plan to meet, to discover, to express ourselves, to create virtual selves, to flirt and date, to break up, and in general, to constantly keep ourselves feeling busy and entertained with as little effort as possible.

As we post and blog and tweet and comment (and as a whole put our friendships on steroids), history has yet to evaluate social networking as good or bad. But for once, with so many of us writing at our computers, the story is in our hands.