Social networking is not as social as we think

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In the age of Facebook and Twitter and instant messaging and email and texting, something has been lost. We’ve lost the simple act of personal communication. Putting words to paper, going for a walk with a friend or having hour long phone conversations has been replaced by GTG, LOL, TTFN, BRB, BBL and Luv u.

My son told me the other evening that teenagers don’t really date in person anymore; they send messages on Facebook or Tweet or text one another. Groups of them go to movies or bowling, but social networks have taken the place of walks around the lake or sitting on the porch, chatting. We don’t really even have a porch of much use on this house, we have steps and a small platform you wait on while the front door opens.

Don’t get me wrong, I like social networking. If it wasn’t for Reddit and Facebook and Twitter and Digg, or the Internet in general, Mad Mike’s America wouldn’t exist. But I miss old fashioned communication, especially letters. I love finding a special card or piece of stationery and writing a personal letter to someone special. We don’t communicate slowly anymore; standard mail is called “snail mail.” We want everything now.

I still have the letter my paternal grandfather sent me the day my son was born. I have the card my maternal grandfather sent me for my 16th birthday. I have notes my son wrote me when he was little, and I have a poem my husband wrote me years ago. My most treasured letters are the ones my mom used to send me. She collected note cards from museums and artists’catalogs, and she would send me little notes, always starting with “Hi Sweetcakes,” When I miss her, I can pull those out, and it feels, for a moment, like she’s sitting next to me. I can smell her perfume and hear her laughter.

You can’t do that with an email. You can’t hold an email to your heart, close your eyes, and be transported back in time. In the back of our family Bible is a letter my best friend, Crissy, wrote me right after we moved from San Diego to Minnesota. That letter is 33 years old, but it reminds me of my life in California, my friends, my 12th birthday when my poor father loaded 5 giggling girls into his Volkswagen Rabbit and took us all to the circus. You can’t relive those kind of memories with an email.

Think back. Remember how fun it was, going to the mailbox and seeing an envelope, hand addressed just to you? Maybe at summer camp, or boarding school, college or far away from home in the military. There’s just something so personal about a letter, an intimacy you can’t achieve online. For me, it’s like Kindle. Yes, they’re spiffy, but I love the feel of paper under my fingers, the sound of pages turning. I love real books, and I love real letters.

Memories are captured in many ways. Journals and diaries, once private, are now called blogs. I’m supremely guilty of putting too much information in a blog, forgetting that others might read it. Journals are private, blogs, not so much. We share everything, and often, we share too much with too many. Privacy is a thing of the past, due in no small part to Facebook and Twitter, both of which encourage us to post every single thing we do throughout the day.

So, here’s a challenge for our readers. Take a social media break, and write some letters. Call a friend, on the actual phone, and go for a walk, grab a cuppa, talk face to face. I know! It’s a novel idea, but one I think we need to embrace from time to time. After you’re reconnected with tangible people, tell us how it went. Let Mad Mike’s know who the lucky recipients of your letters will be. Reconnect the old fashioned way: not with a Facebook poke but with a hug, a long letter written on nice stationery or a phone call. Go back to a time when “instant communication” came with a touch and a kiss and a little pen to paper.

We need to slow down and remember what’s important. Love, laughter and the absolute joy of connecting with people who are important to us. And what better way to do that than by taking time to write letters, listen to their voices and tell them, not message them, but tell them “I love you.”

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