Rat + Bird =Fish?

The rat race was once the only ruler of the workforce. You literally had to be in it to win it and to do that, you had to keep up with the pace and be that early bird to catch the worm. This notion was once confined to the work place but not any longer as the rat has a new partner to play with and compete with and that is the bird.  Tweet, tweet, tweet can you hear the sound of the constant tweets all around? The answer to that is no, as we don’t have super hearing, but if we did imagine the constant deafening noise if words from across the world were turned into sound?

Social media is on demand and it is growing. The symptoms of rat race pressures are taking form in new ways triggered by this contemporary ways of interacting, to such an extent that Facebook Anxiety actually exists as I found out whilst reading my latest edition of Therapy Today.  Research by psychologists at Edinburgh Napier University found interacting with people on the networking site is a major source of stress. Dr Kathy Charles said “It was actually those with the most contacts, who had invested the most time in the site, who were most likely to be stressed.” Facebook withdrawal symptoms also exists and Information Deprivation Disorder is the name given to someone who cannot go without any form of technology. The symptoms apparently are akin to drug addicts trying to give up drugs. So it should come to no surprise that Twitter will naturally have its own addictive qualities and with it symptoms, which is why I make the comparisons to the rat race.

The early bird catches the worm also in this virtual domain where information tweeted first by you is the goal. The number of followers, tweets and retweets is also of a high importance but the prize of all prizes is... being the trending topic. That is the fattest and hardest worm to catch and it takes a desperate, sorry dedicated individual to get there. Constant tweeting coupled with insomnia and something to sell or say, I think is the requirement, I really wouldn’t know. However what my brain seems to conclude is that that if we keep eating the feeds at such an alarming rate then we may turn into... fish!

Fish eat feeds and many out there are doing the same without questioning. We read, retweet, tweet, read, retweet, tweet, again and again like a fish going round and round in a circle.  Nothing is new, yet in the same breath it is. Though how much of it holds any value relevance or importance to our own lives?

I may be well out off the mark here but my thoughts question if social media continues to rise, the correlation between anxiety issues will also rise to such an extent that people will no longer be able to effectively communicate on a one to one confident level. Which means the majority of people will look nervous and shifty all the time or just end up confined to their home to avoid such interaction.  I also believe legible handwriting will be extinct and our brains will be filled with numerous pieces of information, though lacking in any real description because attention spans have been reduced. A little extreme? Perhaps, but possibilities nevertheless.

The difficulty is that work and personal are now wrapped up as one tight bundle, difficult to separate. The pros are also the cons, which means the rat and bird race co-exist side by side as friends and foe. A harmonious balance can be achieved only if individuals are able to step back, slow down and switch off (literally) to process habits.  If you find you cannot live without social networking sites, then you need to find out what the gap in the real world is, which the virtual world is currently filling.

 Find out what the need is and you may just work out whether the chicken or the egg came first...unless you are already a fish that is!


Related Posts:
1.Evolution = Revolution?
2.Too Hard. Too Fast. Too Deep

© Lisa Bent 2011