As we get technologically advanced so does our personal space expands to embrace them. But it is not enough that we develop and advance our technology, we need to raise our spiritual awareness as well, our consciousness level, to be able to reap the best benefits of these trinkets in our lives.
Back in the beginning of the last century we traded our horses into cars. At first it was scarce on the roads, but by the end of the century almost everyone had at least one car in their garages. While more and more people started to get behind the wheel, and since no psychological evaluation is required to get a driver’s license, soon people faced a new rage called “road rage”. The border of our personal space used to end a few feet around us, and we would perhaps get into fights when someone bumped into us. Now we had a car that we felt expanded that space. So when one was driving, and got cut off by another person, either intentionally or unintentionally, the former could feel insulted and depending on the person’s sophistication, they would either just smile, honk, give some hand language, yell, or in the worst case scenario, would shoot at the later driver.
In the eighties, the general population got accustomed to a new trinket, the computers. While by itself this machine was harmless, and did not affect anyone’s personal space substantially, by the early nineties, with the introduction of internet into our everyday lives, our personal space just expanded into cyberspace. Now, people were getting email addresses, got into chat rooms, got into writing matches of vulgarity when felt insulted. But that is where it ended. No one went over to another person’s house to beat them up, or yell at them for what happened in a chat room. In fact often times people use pseudo names, usernames, concealing their real identities. That is until social networks came to life. These sites have the majority of the people using their real names, real information, making everyone more vulnerable to injury and insult. While in a person’s identity on the street is unknown unless you met before; in the car, one’s identity is concealed by the license plates, and again protected unless you have met before, on the social media network sites, such as Myspace or Facebook, one’s identity is wide open depending on their privacy settings. By now these setting on Facebook have gotten so complicated that some people have no idea how to set them to give them the most privacy if any at all. But regardless of that, people spending hours on these sites have not only stretched their personal space but set them in stone on these social network sites. Thus, when someone does not friend you or even worse, unfriends you on one of these sites, you may end up feeling upset, hurt, or even irate. And when one does not have the skills to deal with these kinds of rejections in cyberspace in a civilized manner, and they take it so personally that it turns them violent, then we have created the Facebook Rage.
As the latest incident shows:”A Tennessee couple who ‘defriended’ a woman on Facebook were murdered in their home by the jilted woman’s father and another man.” (See http://news.yahoo.com/facebook-defriending-led-double-murder-police-014442236.html)
One major difference between road rage and Facebook Rage is, that on Facebook, people get more personal from a distance and reveal more intimate information about themselves in a public forum than ever before. While one cannot shoot bullets through the computer as in when driving a car, apparently people are willing to get in a car to go over to your house to shoot you.
Moreover, we have chosen to be more transparent through Facebook and other social networking sites, and we have opened up ourselves to the world on a deeper level than ever before. So, what are we to do when any small part of our expanded personal space gets rejected? The majority of people probably just shake it off and move on, but the less sophisticated social networking site users may turn violent especially if they live geographically in close proximity to you. Maybe we need to have classes offered on internet etiquette, or teach people how to deal with cyberspace rejections without resorting to violence.