LONDON – The head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales is concerned that excessive use of e-mails and text messaging is creating shallow friendships and undermining community life, according to an interview published yesterday.
Dr Vincent Nichols (63), the Archbishop of Westminster, also said popular social networking sites led young people to form “transient relationships” that put them at risk of suicide when they collapsed.
"Friendship is not a commodity, friendship is something that is hard work and enduring when it's right," he told the Sunday Telegraphnewspaper.
I think there’s a worry that an excessive use, or an almost exclusive use, of text and e-mails means that as a society we’re losing some of the ability to build interpersonal communication that’s necessary for living together and building a community.”
The archbishop said too much use of electronic information was “dehumanising”, leading to a loss in social skills and the ability to read a person’s mood through their body language. He added that relationships had been weakened by the decline in face-to-face meetings.
Furthermore, social networking sites encouraged children to place an excessive importance on the number of friends they had instead of the quality of their relationships.
“Among young people often a key factor in their committing suicide is the trauma of transient relationships. They throw themselves into a friendship or network of friendships, then it collapses and they’re desolate,” the archbishop said.
“It’s an all-or-nothing syndrome that you have to have in an attempt to shore up an identity; a collection of friends about whom you can talk and even boast.”
He continued: “We’re losing social skills, the human interaction skills, how to read a person’s mood, to read their body language, how to be patient until the moment is right to make or press a point.
“Too much exclusive use of electronic information dehumanises what is a very, very important part of community life and living together.” – (Reuters, PA)