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Part I - Social evolution and its role in shaping our lives
by Joseph Earnest February 20, 2012
Newscast Media HOUSTON, Texas — During the past week, I have been asked why I made no comment on the recent passing of Whitney Houston, to which I responded by saying, there were thousands of Web sites and articles written on that topic so it wasn't necessary for me to add anything since I'm only one person. However, a persistent reader argued that I should at least write an article about her from a philosophical perspective. I agreed, but said I would do it after she'd been laid to rest — so here is the four-part series I am presenting on social evolution.
When I was a student, as part of my Psychology major, I was required to take a class in Social Psychology. It dealt with how people develop socially and the social dynamics we face in our daily lives. Development is bidirectional, meaning, people change their world as it changes them.
We live in the information age and most of our communication is done electronically. Our socialization is mostly conducted through social networks that seem to weed out the need to develop social skills since we may never meet the people we communicate with socially. We now have a generation that has excelled in communicating electronically at the expense of learning how to interact in a physical setting that requirees building friendships and relationships that have depth. As we witness the evolution of information technology, we cannot overlook the necessity to simultaneously evolve socially, in this information age
Today the younger generation has grown up on the Internet, which those who lived in the 80s and early 90s know was not around, and a crude version of it was only restricted to the military. The benefit of having grown up without Internet forced us to socialize and create friends and relationships in the real world. At the time we still had corded phones and only the affluent could afford cell phones. I once told my dad in the 90s that a cell phone that could take pictures and video would be developed and he laughed at me. Now, you can even watch TV on your cell phone.
There seems to be less need to actually build relationships and friendships that have depth because we are now consumed and bombarded with multiple channels of information, that is a result of the interconnectedness of social media. Our social skills are slowly eroding because even grown men and women have become heavily dependant on the electronic media to socialize. Children who were once raised by parents are now raised on TV and Internet and are deprived of cultivating the skills needed to effectively communicate in the real world.
This is contradictory to the Social Cognitive Theory that states, children learn their roles through socialization. The social reality is that we construct our own realities based on previous experiences and group norms. This includes attitudes and beliefs that lead to behavior. Because social interactions, more often than not, occur electronically, we are creating a generation, or civilization rather, whose social skills are underdeveloped, the result of which may lead to false sense of security. We begin to believe that we have no need to build the communities that our parents and grandparents enjoyed, where people looked out for each other.
There once was a time when neighbors used to borrow sugar and other ingredients from each other. When I was growing up, my mother baked a lot and it was not unusual for her to run out of sugar or flour and send me to the neighbor's home to borrow some sugar. Today that is unheard of. People's lives are very predictable. We go to work, return home, lock ourselves inside our homes and may never speak to a neighbor for two years.
One might argue that people often keep to themselves because being human predisposes us to act in ways to protect and preserve ourselves and those we care about. The problem with that line of thought is, isolation eventually leads to an individualistic culture that I describe in the next section. Continue to Part II>>
Related stories:
PART II - Social evolution and the role it plays in shaping our lives
PART III - Social evolution and the role it plays in shaping our lives
PART IV - Social evolution and the role it plays in shaping our lives
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