There was a class my freshman year where I sat next to the same guy nearly every class. There weren’t assigned seats, but it’s like there’s some unwritten rule in college that after the first week, where you sit is where you sit for the remainder of the class. He was always nice enough. We never introduced ourselves, but he let me borrow a pencil once when I stupidly left all of mine in my dorm. I only ever knew his first name from when he was called on in class, and I’m assuming the same goes for how he knew my name. The class ended, and I never gave much thought to the kid.
A week after the semester I got a notification on my phone saying someone had requested to follow me on Instagram. It was that guy from my class. I accepted the request and went about my day. He started liking my pictures regularly, but as great as that is, wouldn’t it have been better if he got to know me in class rather than through social media? What strikes me as odd is that he never struck up a conversation with me, though he was clearly interested in getting to know me. I’m a normal person; we probably would have become friends. Instead he chose to use Instagram to get my attention, and we will probably never actually have a real conversation. It was a missed opportunity.
Millennials love to use likes, favorites and swipes as a way to say “Hey look you should look at me because I’m looking at you!” but how effective can this really be? Unless you put yourself in front of a person in real life, connections are hard to make. Nobody is going to assume that just because you are all over them on social media, they should reach out to you. Nobody takes hints as well as we like to think they will.
Swiping right to someone on Tinder may seem like a more obvious nudge in the right direction, but so many of those (creepy) conversations lead to nowhere. You can’t expect a few messages to really hit home when you are only given a couple pictures to check out and an uncomfortable pick up line or two as a basis for figuring someone out. Swiping right does not have the same implications as the words “Hey I would like to get to know you better” have, just as a few dozen Instagram likes does not say “We should talk more.” I know we live in an age where was expect technology to do all the work for us, but we should all make a larger effort in real life to get to know people.
