By Dominic Walsh
My wife is not a native of this occasionally lovely country. We moved here two years ago, and as a result, we have a large number of friends and family living in East Asia and California, as well as scattered throughout the rest of the world.
How should we keep in contact with them? The telephone is expensive, unless we use VoIP, but that assumes a similar level of technical expertise from both sides of the conversation. Even with cheap calls, the time difference limits conversations to either late at night or early in the morning, which is hardly ideal. Post is an option, but the cost can soon mount up, not to mention the time involved and the risk of your package going walkabout.
So, thank heavens for social networking. We can keep in touch with our family, check quickly on their well-being and follow the progress of our nieces, nephews and godchildren. As well as this, as an initial immigrant to an alien country, it’s been invaluable for my wife to find and meet new friends in the UK and ex-pat communities. It’s also helped us find work and allowed my wife to quickly and easily display and send her portfolio.
Of course, not everyone looks so kindly on the whole social networking thing. Often those people are journalists, or worse, ‘columnists’. So, Facebook might not be for you, and I myself have a deep-seated aversion to people who put their religion on the census as "Jedi"…
But what I don’t like is senseless denigration without understanding all the ways that people use it. I probably shouldn’t get worked up about this. I should accept that people have their views and they should be respected. But you know what? The hell with it.
If someone launches an ill-conceived, badly-researched attack on something that has been vital to my family, and decides to do so using their privileged position as a journalist on a major national paper, then I’d like to get my own oar in too (even if we have a slightly lower circulation).
It would be pretty easy (and therapeutic) to pick holes in this article. But what’s more worrying is that mainstream journalism on ‘IT’ seems to only have two points of view. Either it’s going to revolutionise the world and we’re all going to end up living, working and breeding (Oh please no…) in Second Life. Or technology is ruining true communities, computer games are hives of blasphemy and everything’s going to end up a bit Judgement Day.
Considering that the vast majority of people I know – across all ages and a vast variety of professions and lifestyles – can accept most technology at face value, taking the best of what works and ignoring that which doesn’t, why then does the mainstream media find it so hard to do the same?
Goodness, you don’t think it’s deliberate, do you…?
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