Church Leader Worried About 'Excessive' Texting and E-mailing

The Archbishop of Westminster said recently in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph newspaper that the amount of texting and e-mailing that children, teens and adults alike engaged in was “dehumanizing” and dangerous for the society. He argued that constructing friendship relationships exclusively around the Internet or text messages was very dangerous, because it placed people at the risk of not knowing how to communicate with each other when they were face to face. One might argue that the church official has a reason to be alarmed up to a point, but that the situation is not as bleak as painted.

“Friendship is not a commodity, friendship is something that is hard work and enduring when it's right. I think there's a worry that an excessive use, or an almost exclusive use of text and emails 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,” Vincent Nichols, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, told the newspaper, Reuters informs.

He also mentioned the fact that social networks and popular networking websites carried large risks for their users, especially young ones. Nichols argued that the large number of friends some people had on these sites was not an indicator of the fact that these users actually knew each other. Being friends with someone online is just one click away. This line of thought is in tune with several scientific studies of these phenomena, which show that children raised with lots of access to computers and networking sites are very likely to be troubled by actually meeting and conversing with new people in real life.

“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 of the growing number of suicides attributed to these environments. Several unfortunate deaths in the last two years have been announced in social media, or through e-mails, and, in the cases where they were broadcast online live, those watching did little to stop the victims, or alert the authorities. This behavior is not that of a civilized society.

Unfortunately, in the case of young children and teens, the risks posed by social networks collapsing are very serious. What to some members of the group is nothing more than a joke is dead serious for others. And because the Internet provides people with seemingly infinite amounts of anonymity, users can afford to be as mean as they want, on account of the fact that their identity cannot be traced. An average man or woman, with no peculiar behavior in real life, may become a ruthless bully online, studies have shown, and the most exposed to this type of influence are children.