In the modern world nothing is ever as innocent as it appears and that also goes for our technology. Just like every other facet of our lives the internet and the ability to interact with strangers through social networking sites is opening up a Pandora’s box which is burning as many relationships as it creates.
Very recently I came across two items of information which are both equally disturbing. The first was about the so-called ‘Facebook Killer’ who murdered his estranged wife in her sleep because she apparently had changed her marital status to single on Facebook and had stated that she was now actively looking for men.
Equally disturbing was the news that women are becoming addicted to Facebook because through a quirk of culture or nature we tend to use the number of friends we have as a way of affirming how beautiful and popular we are and Facebook is, by default, designed to help an individual network and form many online relationships.
Both of these point to the fact that as we mature in the use we make of the technology that surrounds us and migrate some of our business and social life on the web we also migrate the tendency to make the same mistakes we make offline. The web enables us to work in a larger, faster fashion that we can do offline with a far wider reach and it is no different when it comes to forming relationships and creating friendships. The fact that online technology makes it easier to do this means that many of us will do just that.
The point here is that we cannot blame the web or Facebook for a relationship falling apart any more than we can blame Henry T. Ford for the death toll on Mediterranean roads. These are the symptoms. The cause is a deep unrest with who we are and an unacknowledged unhappiness with the relationships we form.
If we manage to understand the former and acknowledge the latter we then stand a good chance to build happy, lasting relationships which fulfil us more than anything the online world can ever hope to offer.