To Tickle your Listicle: 12 things that are socially acceptable now, that weren’t when we were kids
1. Text fights, text apologies.
2. Birthday greetings to everyone you’ve ever met. (No excuse for forgetting the grocery clerk’s birthday anymore.) Just be prepared to write a unique happy birthday greeting about 200 times per year- the average number of friends a typical person has on Facebook.
3. Condolences online, mandatory. Funeral attendance, optional. Same rule applies to congratulations for baby showers, engagement parties and weddings.
4. Major life milestones announced to grandma, 3rd grade teacher, husband’s uncle and best friend’s ex boyfriend simultaneously with one click.
5. Photos of what you are doing in real time. Look at my car that just went through the car wash, lunch, Secratary’s day gift, baby in a baby beret giving me the baby bird, marathon t-shirt covered in sweat and party balloons, hotel pool from the vantage of my chaise lounge in the Caribbean, but all I am showing you is the empty hotel pool, and not the actual Caribbean.
6. Hashtags no longer mean the number sign. On top of that, its ok to misspell and misuse the words in a hashtag; it makes you look ironic.
7. Pregnancy, gender reveal, and newborn pictures done so creatively, that it becomes your goal to have your photo re-pinned at least 5,000 times and show up in your newsfeed months later, upon which time you can tag yourself and take credit for the idea, even if you did originally find it on Pinterest– but not using the same props, so its totally different.
8. Sending a tweet out to brag that you just saw the back of a famous person’s head while at the airport.
9. Sending an Instagram out of the back of a famous person’s head from 20 feet behind in said crowded airport, filtered in Lo-Fi so the head really stands out against the grainy zoom of the phone camera.
10. Having social media accounts for your pets. Having pets who have more followers than you, and their own hashtags.
11. Being “friends” with 13 year olds, as long as they friended you first. And their parents know. Ok, even then, this one just weirds me out.
12. Sending intimate texts to your husband/wife/girlfriend/boyfriend. Receiving one back from your co-worker, cousin, sister and the Craigslist guy selling that overpriced truck. Nobody thinking anything much out of the ordinary of the mishap.
I often wonder what would happen if we took people’s cell phones, tablets, computers and all things electronic away for a day or even a week. How long would it take before they cracked? Would they actually read a book if there were no TV? Would they write their thoughts down on paper if they couldn’t type it? Manners have flown out the window and with them real, meaningful conversation. It’s a sad truth.
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So very true. We’ve grown accustomed to the distractions. In fact, accustomed to the point that our children and theirs may never know what they are actually missing. My goal here is to get us all thinking about ways to improve real human connection. When you say, “what if we took all..” Perhaps the solution is what we are beginning to slowly see and hear- the idea of challenging ourselves for a short period of purging our personal worlds of the devices that distract us.
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A friend of mine just self published a novel on that theme. You might want to check it out. It’s on Amazon and Smashwords. The title is “Distracted Living” and her name is Eileen Lynch. She writes fun dry wit with the theme
that our lives no longer hold room for getting to know people and comunicating with them. We all need a wake up call. Our lives seem to be run by electronics. Even refrigerators now have LCD screens!
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Thank you, I will check it out. You may find my other posts in this blog of interest, particularly this one:
https://youllsoonbeflying.com/2014/01/09/why-eye-contact-fell-flat-on-its-face/
I have been discouraged at the direction human interaction has been going for several years. I am frankly glad that my concerns have now become more mainstream. We can all learn from each other, especially when we share our information. ~Best
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