‘WE spend more time on the Internet than spending time with our families,' remarked Fateh Shewkani, a medical student and member of the hugely popular social networking Web site Facebook. “Social networking has indeed changed our lifestyle in the 21st century.” Back in the nineties, families used to sit together during meals or in the evening, where they would exchange views on a range of issues and share their problems with each other. Now, however, people living in the same house will sit together on the same sofa and ‘chat' on MSN rather than turning around and talking physically. As absurd as it sounds, a friend of mine admitted that she and her husband exchanged messages on MSN while she checked her email. Saudi Gazette spoke with a number of people registered on Facebook and other social networking mediums like Twitter and asked them whether they felt their lives had changed due to social networking and how much it affected social and family values. “This social networking has taken families apart as well because we prefer to spend time in virtual reality, rather than with our parents, siblings and children,” remarked Qudsiya Lalli who is an active user of Facebook herself. Another mother Erum Assad, complained that the widespread prevalence of social networking has meant that children are spending more and more time on the Internet, making ‘friends' with complete strangers. She remarked that when parents could see and meet their child's friends in person, there was a greater degree of security because “parents always kept an eye on the behavior of the friend and their child in his or her presence.” She added, “Now I have to keep an eye on emails, chats and the messages they send to their friends and receive from them. This makes it very difficult to monitor them and is the reason why our children are losing moral values. This obsession with social networking is also translating into poorer health as lack of exercise or even normal day-to-day movements have been greatly reduced. Another implication has been the sheer abundance of information users of these Web sites - including children - are making public property. Photographs and personal details are often posted on these sites making users very vulnerable to a potential abuse of such information. In the pre-social networking age, we had a few friends who knew about us on such a personal level, but the availability of such information is now a prerequisite to making friends. This has left people with no time for their siblings or ‘real' friends, according to another worried mother. “Not only children, but adults are also getting trapped in this web os social networks; social gatherings have almost vanished as children and their parents lead separate virtual lives and there is no coordination between the two,” remarked Aasia Khan. “We used to read a lot of books in our free time and now this habit has almost vanished, especially from the lives of children. These books were like best friends and taught both the good and bad of life.”
