Alternate Reality - Is Internet Guilty of Murdering our Social Life?

One of the major reason that leads people to suffer from schizophrenia is that they are unable to cope with the realities of life. They are so overwhelmed by the troubles of life that they refuse to deal with them by refusing to acknowledge them.

Fight or flight is a primal instinct of human being. But in the case of schizophrenia, you somehow manage to get stuck in between. You create an alternate reality where you live the way you want and without the problems that are troubling your real life.

It's like that dialogue in the movie, "Inception" - do they sleep to live or live to sleep? ( or something similar). The point is that just like in the movie that people consciously made themselves sleep in order to live in the "reality" of their dream, the schizophrenic does the same thing albeit not consciously.

Now take a look at the way we live. Most of us are guilty of creating an alternate reality in terms of our virtual identity. We have found a way of dealing with our problems by either venting it out in the virtual world or distracting yourself. Internet is an information highway and it has sufficient data to keep our mind satiated for as long as we want. Internet has become our refuge where we seek solace from the harsh and bitter truths of the real world.

This begs the question, how are we different from the schizophrenics?

There are countless cases that I've encountered where people are almost polar opposite identities in their real and virtual lives. An extremely social person may not bother with social networking and hence, will be someone who is not part of the "in" crowd in the virtual world. Similarly, a person who is extremely vocal in the virtual world may find him/herself incapable of carrying a normal conversation in the real world.

Another point that I will like to raise is that it is proven that when people are taking a decision in a group, they are susceptible to groupthink, where people are prone to accepting uncreative or unfeasible decision in order to seem "agreeable". This poses a significant threat of people being led to taking choices that may not be in the best interest to them.

Now, apply this to the world of social networking.  The viral videos, scams, or the various propaganda that have become a widespread trend. Why is it that people are so gullible to accepting "false truths" or the latest fads? People, in fact, are basing more and more of their choices on what is popular, which in many cases is not the best or at least, good enough.
 This is understandable if you consider the sheer amount of choices that we are bombarded with everyday. This makes it unfeasible and irrational to conduct due diligence on every choice. However,  it can be extremely dangerous when we start applying this to most of the decisions of our lives and start following trends blindly.

I often wonder that are we getting dumber as time is passing by? Internet has radically redefined how we live our lives especially in Pakistan where high speed DSL became affordable for people around 2008. Ever since then, life has not been the same for me. For one, time sure is flying by and I mostly find myself struggling to manage life. It's like a race, so much is happening so fast that you are just trying to keep up.

I guess the biggest challenge that faces us, in this regard, is how to separate the real things from the noise all around us?
We may be in touch constantly in touch with each other virtually but take some time and meet people directly. You will find that those few hours that you spend with your closed ones are worth much more than all the time that you've spent being "in touch" online.