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Has the internet killed socializing as we knew it?

We have today in this country a far greater percentage of single women and men than in my living memory and before that. One of the reasons is the enabling of women to live outside a marriage.

Before the birth of the Welfare State a woman was trapped in a marriage, as she would literally starve to death if she left her husband, unless someone else, such as a family member or friend would feed her.

We now see a communication explosion where people can contact other people so easily right across the world. Distance has been eroded but while we chat to people at a distance what is happening on our shoulder?

Excitement is the key today; people spend their lives trying to be noticed, trying to be the best at something, anything. Gone is the decent hard working life with the mundane job which came in with farming and industrialization which gave you a decent living and a quiet retirement. Today the word on the street is you get nothing by working for someone else, you have to strike out and make it big.

Has the internet and the media raised expectations to a degree which is impossible? Advertisers tell us if we buy a ticket we could win a million in the blink of an eye. Press a button and log on to the internet and you can talk to someone thousands of miles from you in seconds. The impossible is now possible, according to the advertisers and the media. So while you converse through a machine with someone in outer Mongolia, the house next door burns down. You can watch it on the news later; you now have catch up tv, so no need to break off the conversation.

You get on a train today and zombies wordlessly and expressionlessly stand in front of you and jostle to get on to the train oblivious of who is around them, ears plugged with sounds from another galaxy, who knows? I was taught to wait my turn, these people only see a train door and make for it totally oblivious of the person standing in front of them with the same objective and they just sidestep and jump in front of you. Who? Was there someone else there? Oh hard luck, you will have to be faster next time, and throw that stick away it is dangerous.

To return to the single men and women who spend their lives looking for someone to love and to love them. The places where people used to socialize, such as pubs, clubs, dance halls, have disappeared as fast as internet dating sites have appeared. No longer do you have to travel to meet that man or woman of your dreams, if we believe the advertisers they are all waiting for you to arrive. But arrive where, there is nowhere to go.

 Today’s pubs and clubs, the ones that are left that is, are not full of people out to meet someone else. Money is getting less available for food yet alone to pay for taxi fares as you cannot drink drive to go out for a quiet drink. If you do put aside a little cash for a night out then there is no one else out there as they do not have the money either, so your night is like a damp squib, stuck in the corner with one or two friends, if you are lucky and nothing going on around you. Save up your pennies and go out for a nice meal. Apart from your group in the corner nothing else is happening in the pub restaurant where you have arrived to party.

In a nutshell there is nowhere to go, only the internet; which is why internet dating sites capture the hordes; one might even say desperate hordes. All those single men and women, looking for the ideal, seeing it on the silver screen, be it a tv or a computer, facing them, tantalizing them, come and find me, I am waiting for you.

 Another night crawling into bed alone, another night with just one cup of cocoa to make, another day tomorrow earning enough money to survive and another night on the computer tomorrow searching for ‘ the one’.

Has the internet caused this, is the internet the facilitator or the cause?

We are losing shops daily across the nation, our lives are being streamlined, there is nowhere to go but the choice of being single is possible and to many people it has been an escape from purgatory. But is the single state all it is portrayed to be by the media, is winning possible, can every woman find a Christian Gray and can every Christian Gray find his woman?

Life has been distorted. Life as I knew it has gone. A whole generation of single mums and dads have failed to find that green grass on the other side.

I hope the young generation learn to cope better with advertisers, I hope that those young people who jump on the train with the huge ear muffs on telling them all they want to know which is nothing to do with the people alongside them, what people? Will find a way to socialize, to make contact with other earthly beings and are not left in limbo in a world that offers everything under the sun but delivers nothing for it is not able to.

 It is a dream machine, but dreams are just that, reality does not beckon those who cannot see it, where do we go from here?

Just a small piece of my life, pre internet, pre television and what I call real life, hard perhaps but was it more fulfilling than what we have today in the ‘dream machine’?

My Beautiful Slum

Since the film ‘Slumdog Millionnaire’, proved a big hit, I have heard the word slum enter into the vocabulary of people far more and one man on a popular show I happened to be listening to this week stated that he was brought up in a slum and did not have a bath until he was 17; he quickly went on to explain not a plumbed in bath in a bathroom.

I friend whose cup never seems to reach half full and who I grew up alongside said to me a little while back, “ you do realize we were brought up in slums do you”.

Well if I was brought up in a slum it was my beautiful slum.
I asked another friend this morning, as the seeds of writing about my beautiful slum came to me in the night, the following questions :-

Do you remember being freezing cold as a child?
Were you ever afraid to go home as a child?
Were you ever hungry as a child?
Were you ever beaten as a child?
Do you ever remember being different to the other children in school?
Do you remember cuddles from your parents?

She also grew up in the same village as me and she answered “no” to every question except the last which was a resounding "yes".

We grew up over fifty years ago with no running water, a coal fire in one room on which our cooking was also done, a “ty bach” (outside toilet) at the bottom of the front garden and flag stone floors.

Yes life must have been hard and yes if we grew up in that manner today perhaps our homes could be ‘classified’ as ‘slums’.

But let me tell you that home of mine was the most beautiful warm welcoming place to be. Our parents protected us from the elements. They filled our bellies with good food, they held us and rocked us to sleep and made sure we had good warm (ex army grey wool) blankets to cover us on the coldest of nights.

I lived in a beautiful ‘slum’ which to me was called home and always will be.

The media portrays an image of how we should be living, but this way of living is not the norm for most people and those people who are chasing the ‘dream’ which is purely an image feel they are falling short and often are the ones who abuse the children they should be protecting, whether in a “slum” or a mansion.

 Home IS where the heart is and the way we lived as children is the way people today who try to ‘get away from it all’ are seeking.

Is the way forward to look back?