Say goodbye to good ole fashioned table conversations.

Social media has become the pinnacle of today’s entertainment, news, and long-distance group communication. It has come a long way from the BBS sites where you could only imagine what the person behind the computer looked like. Not to mention the response time of getting a reply in a timely manner. Mainly due to poor connection and having funds to pay for internet when it first came out in the late 60’s. I remember when I first used AOL’s Instant Messenger, I was probably a freshman maybe a sophomore in high school. I didn’t have internet at the time due to my parents not being able to pay for it but a friend of mine had it. So, we would get on the computer wait for the dial up to connect, that 56k modem was fast for its time hahaha. We would get on the chat boards and just start talking about random stuff. It was fun but most of the time we could not get a connection.

Then in 2003, Myspace came around.  A platform where you could customize your very own page. You could add videos, backgrounds, and intro music. Myspace allowed you to share your common interests with people from around the world and become cyber friends. It easily allowed you to share photos, and videos. Soon you had a friend list of hundreds of people that sometimes you didn’t even know. Strangers that would send you a friend request just because you like the same song. Myspace was cool for a couple of years and then it just dropped out of the picture. Facebook came along and good bye myspace. After a couple of weeks using Facebook I had forgotten my username and password. Besides most of all my friends and cyber friends were already using Facebook so there was no reason to go back to boring Myspace. Now the social media phenomenon begins Facebook started in 2004 followed by YouTube in 2005. By now you are seeing people walking down the street staring at their phones and not paying attention to their surroundings. Less and less people are physically communicating with each other. Most notably there is a decline in the noise you hear coming from the neighborhood. Kids are now glued to tablets, phones, and computers. I remember back in my days we played touch football, hide, and seek and tag with all the kids from the neighborhood.  Families are now at the dinner table with each parent and child glued to their hand without a care in the world seeing what’s on Facebook, twitter, Instagram, snapchat you name it they’re on it.  I recently had an experience with some of my coworkers. We were at a restaurant in here in town. One of the guys that was with us is an older Airforce retired gentleman. Well we ordered our food and low and behold be were glued to our phones. No one was talking to anyone in the group. Then we hear a deep voice “you all should get a life and get off your phones”. At that moment, I realized that social media had taken ahold of me because even at times I catch myself doing the same thing around my family and that isn’t fair to them.