If I should check if people really work during the day and, if I should open my Facebook’s personal page for checking them, I should probably conclude that people don’t really work during the day at all.
Why?
It’s 4.51 pm and if I open my Facebook’s page right now, I would notice that most of my contacts are online. It wouldn’t mean necessarily that they are chatting. Someone could argue that they are just online because of most of them own a smart phone which allows you them to be online even though you they are not really online.
Yet if I try to chat with some of them, they respond to me in a very short time, that obviously means that they are not so concentrated on their job at least.
We could eventually claim that people live on the Facebook, since they can find a great numbers of people who are always online.
One can get quick replies to messages, and it does not a matter if you are writing to them in early morning or over lunch or in bed.
I am wondering why are people so addicted to that social network, why do they live for sharing their pictures that they actually have just taken on the beach, at the restaurant and in whatever place in this small and not so private anymore world.
It seems that people are not interested anymore in protecting their privacy. Yet there are a lot of social and legal battles for defending the fundamental right of the human being to have a private life.
We struggle every day against the "Big Brother", in every form in which he appears to us, but, on the other hand we need to share with other friends that we have just came back from the toilet and that we had a very satisfactory evacuation .
We don’t forget that we never stop chatting, and chatting, all the day, without stopping.
Are we entrapped in the web? Are we entrapped in this virtual world that our mind believes to be real?
Why do we need to chat without stopping and to share every second of our most private events of our life- birth, death, marriage etc., with everyone? We all have to admit that most of us have a contact’s list which contains a 50% minimum percentage of who are not direct friends who actually don't deserve to share with us such an important events like those mentioned above.
There would be a lot of answers to these questions, and I am sure that social scientists would write and maybe they have already written various essays about the infinite philosophical, sociological, psychological aspects related to this huge phenomenon. Yet all those scientists could agree on one basic truth that blends all of these infinite aspects together.
The cause of such human behavior is actually justified from one fundamental emotion:
LONELINESS
We do what we do because we feel alone. We do what we do because we are actually alone. We do what we do because we lack love in our lives and we feel it so empty.
In a world where communication is easy and powerful, we all still feel alone. We need more social relationships, we have a great need of being recognized by others. We need to read on our Facebook’s page the friends’ comments: “Lucky you, what a wonderful place!”, “You look beautiful”, or maybe we just need to read: “Hey, don’t forget, I know that you exist and I love you”.
Yet we actually don’t need to read it, we need to feel it, we need to look into the eyes of the person who is telling us.
We need not to forget that people are real and that they have a body whose heat we can really feel and whose arms, legs, head can be really touched.
We think that we don’t have time, we always lack the time, but if we never take this time…
We have to struggle against our laziness, we have to struggle against the strong illusion that the web is the reality, because it is obviously not.
We have to remember that our REAL friends are real and that we know them.
We know where they live, we can go out and ring their house’s bell and say them: “Hey man, I missed you so I decided to drop in to say hi, how about a drink together?”.
We need to pass more time in the real world, because it is supposed that a real world exists as we are real again.
If we will lose ourselves in the Internet illusion we won’t only need our friends or our loves, we are actually going to forget our souls in a world of false ideas.
Yet we are not ideas, we are human, we are souls and we are real.
-Raffaele Ranieri- all rights reserved-
