Your mother has posted something on your Wall

As far as I know there is not a single iPhone or Blackberry in sight at the Heathrow Airport arrivals gate in the opening sequence to Love Actually. There are mothers and sons, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends but not a soul is on the internet or instant messaging. They wait eagerly for their loved one to emerge, without interruption from the virtual world.

Dinner at a friend’s house a few weeks ago now did not offer the same bliss, due to beeping Blackberries (and these ones were not work related, I assure you).

The writer and journalist India Knight of The Sunday Times who dedicates her weekly column to social affairs has identified a paradox: we spend an increasing amount of time with other humans but ignore these real individuals by tapping away online or on some other aesthetically pleasing gadget.

Exhibit A: a glance around a bar on a Friday night. Are we are all so desperate to have our voices heard that we find a much more responsive, indulging and immediate global audience in engaging with others via Facebook, Twitter, sms?

Attention seeking is no longer the exclusive pass time of children; adults have a delicious hunger for it too.

Exhibit B: we juggle and multitask with Blackberries, mobiles, laptops, pagers (or is that only doctors nowadays?), while at work and at home. This attention seeking is, at times, pure peacock-feather waving (how many Facebook status updates do you read or post hourly? Do we need to know, as I read last week, ‘Andrea spent all day in bed with fever going up to 39.2, then down after taking pills, only to go up again. At least this seems to kill off the cough’? (I have since learnt that Andrea is feeling much better; a real doctor, not Facebook, provided his medicine)).

Exhibit C: often Twittering, emailing, Facebooking, sending a sms takes place while we are in the physical company of our beloveds. I, for one, have succumbed to a flashing Blackberry or to checking Facebook on more occasions than I am prepared or willing to admit even when seeing my family for the first time in months. Tragic, I know.

The people who we profess to love, cherish and know (partners, children, old school friends) sit around the dinner table while we engage with our ‘online people’ and virtual world. Is our need to engage with a global audience smothering the place for traditional family life (whatever that may be for you) and digging a grave for real time social interaction?

Technology has revolutionised communication and connectivity with friends and family. Skype is every expat’s or exchange student’s new best friend and its success has brought with it new degrees of intimacy for its users. The success of social networking websites cannot be overstated. Other than my mother, I cannot think of anyone who does not have an online profile.

The Dutch love Hyves. Blogging is universal. MySpace seems to be for music lovers. As for Facebook, even the OECD’s first ever report on the well being of children published on 1 September 2009 refers to the “Facebook” years. IPhones or Blackberries enable you to connect with the online world in seconds.

A Dutch neighbour, a busy lawyer with a commercial practice, loathes his Blackberry but it does mean he gets to rush out of the office the odd hour during the week to watch his son play football. Admittedly he would prefer not to have to scan emails periodically but being there on the sidelines is far better than not in my book.

Social life extends to online communities. You move to a new city, a new country even (ahem, me) and suddenly what you are doing on a Thursday night is based on your Facebook connections (incidentally, I have 23 new ‘friends’ in the three weeks since moving to Maastricht).

You get to wow and keep in touch with your old friends by posting pictures of your new home. If you have dreams, thoughts, dislikes about anything at all from pomegranates to finding your inner Zen you can start a blog or just comment on someone else’s.

If you want a date you can sift through hundreds of dating sites to find your victim. Once you get a date, you can add to your pre-date rituals the joy of clicking away like crazy and online background checking the lucky individual. All of this happens at a touch of a button.

An elegant Belgian friend of mine (not just in the Facebook sense) and Maastricht resident challenged me when I uttered the topic of this article. Her response centred on the role social networking sites play as a “catalyst for the development of social relations” as she saw it. She continued by adding “people are more expressive on Facebook than they are in their day-to-day lives”.

Other friends proffered their views: a rather dapper German gentleman and self-claimed child of the “Gameboy generation” heralds technology’s impact on facilitating communication (although he tells me that he still loves writing letters) and a talented Spaniard and new arrival to Limburg sees technology as a complement to life, not a substitution. Agreed, entirely.

Not everyone uses social media with the same goals and online personalities can be more colourful than day-to-day lives permit. Scanning photos and status updates and the chirpy comments on a MySpace page (or other) may act as a catalyst for friendship if the photos you see provide conversation fodder when you next meet the person.

There is, however, something to be said for starting with a blank canvass and seeing where the paint lands. Fine it might take you a bit longer to work out whether there is a blooming friendship without the online titbits and insider background knowledge but there is something exciting, sexy even, about getting to know someone over a coffee or a glass of bubbly.

As for our old friends and family, are we more interested in checking a person’s profile, blog or Twitter rather than enjoying real time with a loved one or catching up with a school friend? Of course not (I hope).

I cheer anything that enables the people I want to be around be in one place at the same time (even if that has to involve a web cam). Other than at the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport, or any airport for that matter, if the people I love need to have their iPhones or Blackberries when I see them, so be it.

We may be occupied with beeping devices or checking a profile or two but sometimes simply seeing each other is enough for me.

By Michael Wells-Greco

Michael Wells-Greco, a solicitor in his former life, now undertaking post-grad studies at the University of Maastricht.