Rome, Italy, Jan 19, 2009 / 10:23 am
The L’Osservatore Romano has published some excerpts from an article that will soon appear in La Civilta Cattolica written by Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro, who warns of the risks of using social networking sites such as Facebook or Myspace, which can submerge users in loneliness and fragile friendships and are inadequate substitutes for the natural desire to be loved.
Father Spadaro says that on Facebook, “the need to know others and to make oneself known, and the need to experience friendships are ‘serious’ needs that run the risk of confusing superficial and sporadic relationships with friendship; or communication with exhibitionism; or the fact of wanting to know others with voyeurism. While the difference between the one and the other is radical, an appropriate education in relationships and one’s self-perception is needed in order to see it.”
The Gregorian University professor also explained that Facebook “is in this sense a challenge because as with all social networking platforms, it is both a potential aid for relationships as well as a threat” because relations between human beings are not “a game and require time and direct knowledge.”
Father Spadaro later pointed out that “relationships on the internet are necessarily always shaky if they are not anchored in reality. In some cases the desire to have many contacts in Facebook and thus ‘collect’ friends … becomes a challenge to loneliness and to the desire to feel and appear popular. In effect, the desire to appear extroverted, sought out, and in other words, loved, cannot be underestimated. Having many friends means showing others you are socially attractive,” he said.