emotionally crippled by itechnology

Just recently one of our Television programs spoke of recent research that was pointing out how our young people were failing to learn how to emotionally communicate face to face because of a reliance upon impersonal communicating via iPhone and texting and twitter and the like.

iPhone and twitter and texting are playing such a dominant place in the lives of our young that they are failing to learn to read the physical cues that people give in face to face communication. In this way they fail to realise that what they are saying is being misunderstood, or hurting or offending the person who is listening, and so they fail to take this into account with what they go on to say. The person may indeed not realise that you are being serious about the subject you are talking about when they don't read the cues on your face or body posture.

In this way, they are not learning to socialise, and here I mean they don't learn to socialise with the wider community and varied age groups. Sadly this failure of learning to socialise with the wider community even if they have a inner circle of "friends" make them very vulnerable to isolation and depression. Is it no wonder that so many young people attempt suicide claiming they are not "loved" when in reality they are certainly loved by their family or even other "friends", yet what they are claiming in fact is they are not being loved by the person or persons they are fixated upon. What they have not learnt is how to deal with rejection. That some people will reject you for whatever reason, perhaps because they are not infatuated with you as you are in them, and so you need not see this as "my existence is pointless."

Something else we need to ponder in this regard is the frequent use today of Universities having their lectures broadcast so that students don't need to attend the lecture. What this does is to take them out of the social engagement involved in being at a lecture. It becomes merely a passing on of information in the moment with no opportunity for the student to talk with other students about the lecture on the way out the door, or even interact and ask the lecturer some point during the lecture.

From what I can observe, we are failing our young when we fail to teach them to socialise and this will surely come back to bite us as a society.

Peace
Gary