The ubiquitous, alluring flood of modern social media that allows us to feel we walk on water, flows without fear of the price attached to addiction. Little do we know, we are not gliding gracefully like Jesus, but drowning in waves of all-consuming technology. The gardens of greed and inhumanity in technology have overgrown the fence that was once our foundation, our morality.
As the sun goes up, we type, stalk, refresh, tweet, tumblr, like, share, revine. As the sun goes down, we post, double-tap, send, scan, comment, erase, read, ignore. The use of social media is so innately ingrained in our routines, in our relationships, we have no choice but to reevaluate what love looks in this modern construct of technology’s tease.
The commotion over of our technological addiction is not about how much time we waste and wither under the blue, bouncing screen of our Facebook news feed. It’s not about how many times we can tweet in an hour or how grossly self-involved we’ve become with falsified popularity in the form of ‘likes.’ This isn’t about our infatuation with technology and media – it’s about humanity.
Now, what is the innate tie between technology and humanity? The very notion that there isn’t one – the two cannot coexist in one mental, social, universal space, much like one cannot attest to an avid vegetarian lifestyle while indulging in a softly stacked double cheese-burger. Technology is warping with the winds of winter this season. Websites die, apps are replaced, consumer demands are raised. In this unfailing eternity of change in online media, the way in which we utilize such tools is altered with each adjustment of the grand wide web.
There are applications, websites, companies in the world that will play the game of God – assuming responsibility for human hearts. In what universe, other than this lost earth has a physical product become so omnipotent, so powerful, it has the power to break human hearts with a scan of a website, a charge of 50$ and phone call from a low-key company dumping or divorcing your lover, or make that, ex-lover.
Consumers have the upper hand. We demand unique features, we long for the satisfaction of our technological hunger that is aching for technology to become so highly human, we don’t have to be.
The digital footprint of modern relationships is as hard to miss as Neil Armstrong’s footprint stamped into the moon. There are text messages, hours of Skype calls logged, Instagram tags and posts and widespread evidence in the framework of Facebook showing fallen relationships. What do you do when your significant other has paid $10 for iDUMP4U to make a breakup call to you?
Have no fear, just head on over to KillSwitch, an app, according to the Huffington Post, that launched on Valentine’s Day that covertly erases evidence of your esteemed ex who didn’t have the courage to confront the decay of your relationship humanly and honestly.
For $0.99 the application will erase all photos posted with a specific target, further erasing evidence of wall posts and ‘likes’ between two ex-lovers. KillSwitch is taking the upper hand in a personal grieving process. If you really wish to overcome the loss of a love and feel compelled to erase evidence of your ex’s presence, shouldn’t you have the courage, the dignity to do so personally and self-reliantly? We ask ourselves with a tone of vexed loyalty but fear of technology, how do we operate modern media to manage human relationships?
We don’t. We don’t use technology to manage relationships, for human love affairs, disputes of disagreement and personal passion cannot be communicated, boosted, managed by some metal machinery that stands between us and the real world. Technology is killing human connection like KillSwitch is killing evidence of a relationship, a love, a loss that must have been so vast, you felt the need to buy the app. We teeter-totter with the very nature of truth, the nature of what has happened in our lives.
If your relationship was so deep you felt the need to purchase KillSwitch to cover the tracks of your fallen love, you are in essence killing a piece of your past, your identity. How truthfully do we want to interact with our digital world? Technology is just a vehicle, a permanent, online, twisted display of our disconnect with human nature. The gross accessibility of technology compels us to use media out of curiosity, hunger for more virtual connect, not out of necessity. We have removed ourselves so far from the relationship process through social media that we assume KillSwitch can accomplish the human grieving process for us like it accomplishes the vanishing act of your ex online. Technology and media, robotic by nature, have no capability to emote sentiment with the intensity, the joy, the anger, the infatuation of the human heart – not yet, at least.
We don’t use social media to manage our relationships, rather, we use it to construct them without genuine human interaction and we use it to destroy the evidence of digital ‘love’ turned sour.
Thanks to Twitter – nowadays your relationship can end in under 140 characters.
This is our millennial generation, but what about those to rise when we’ve wrinkled and aged? For modern children’s social skills are declining as they spend more time with digital media and less time with face-to-face contact. According to the UCLA Newsroom, scientists at the University of California Los Angeles found that sixth graders who went five days without glancing at a smartphone or other digital screen did substantially better in reading human emotions than sixth-graders whose technological use was consistent. How will your children find love in their world?
Studies by The Bonded Family show that 48 percent of all first marriages will eventually end in divorce, while 79 percent of women and 89 percent of men re-marry within five years of their first marriage’s end. 43 percent of marriages involve a second or third remarriage, while 68 percent of remarriages involve children from prior relationships. How does modern media accommodate the blended family that has been your neighbor, your friend, your actual family?
One third of divorce filings in 2011 used the word “Facebook,” according to XPOSE. For there is a heavy overlap between Facebook and relationships that extends beyond divorce filings. Children’s Facebook profiles are used as evidence of poor parenting for the benefit of one parent and the demolition of another in custody battles. According to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers as noted on XPOSE, divorce attorneys recognize a spike of 81% in the use of Facebook and other social networks as sharp evidence in divorce proceedings. But if you are unhappily married, seeking freedom, on the verge of divorce, look no further.
Nowadays, at the cost of no courage whatsoever, you can pay to deliver a basic breakup, an engagement breakup, or a divorce call if you feel the end is near. According to The Atlantic, iDUMP4U charges $10 for a basic breakup, a call to the significant other who you no longer wish to be significant. The call will end the relationship using the information you have provided as the cowardly non-dumping dumper. For only $25, you can escape the hardship of being the runaway bride and flee from a marriage you clearly are not ready for. Alas, for $50 they will delicately send a divorce call over to your spouse, the one you committed to until death do you part…for better or for worse.
Just as easily as we begin online relationships through media platforms, we end them through an online service, a phone call from a paid company, a voice your lover won’t recognize delivering devastation. Has media made our way in and way out of relationships so easy, we don’t even know how to be in one, how to feel, how to cope with romantic enchantment or how to walk gracefully when two roads of a relationship diverge? At this rate, we might as well marry the subtle stalker that likes all of our posts on Facebook within a 120 second margin of its posting. You can always call a cold, dream-slashing company to help deliver your desire for divorce!
We are so accustomed to the non-confrontational, dishonest, cold lack of face-to-face interaction of modern media – that the beginning, middle, and end of relationships are rooted in technology. Do you know how to tell someone you love them? Do you know how to smile at the 98-year-old grandma who winks at you in the frozen food aisle? Do you know how to pursue someone in friendship? Do you know how to embrace the truth, the death of feelings, the beginning of love, the loss of spark, the hope of romance? Perhaps we should stop emoji-ing, texting, tweeting around the matters of the human heart, for when you breath your last breaths, your phone may be beside you, but the memories in which you mattered on this earth belong only in your mind.
Disconnect your technology, connect to humanity, life awaits.