We've become adept at text and online chat, so why can't we interact in real life, asks Róisín Ingle
Next time you're at a party, look more closely at the social interaction that is or, more interestingly, is not going on around you. Observe the shy-looking woman in the corner successfully avoiding talking to anyone new by chain-texting on her mobile phone. The clique of friends in the kitchen, their body language and loud bravura warning off strangers to the group. The man heading off to hide temporarily in the box-room because he ran out of small talk an hour ago. Mingling is fast becoming a dying art, or so the result of the latest lifestyle survey suggests.
Released this week, the Europe-wide ICM survey suggests we are more socially stunted than ever, with a whopping 93 per cent of us too shy to approach new people at a party. When at social events, over half of those interviewed for the survey, which was carried out on behalf of the makers of Gourmet Pringles, admitted to pretending to play with a mobile phone to avoid conversation. Just under a third said they would not talk to people they didn't know at a party.
Technology gets the blame in a lot of these surveys. In this case our unwillingness to engage face-to-face with new people is a result of an overload of hi-tech modes of communication. We are choosing texting over talking and it doesn't bode well for our social or emotional health, according to UK-based psychologist Dr Linda Papadopoulos.
"There is no doubt that we are changing the way we relate to each other. New technologies are impacting on our relationships. We spend hours in chatrooms, we date online and we text instead of talk. All this means the skills we need for personal interaction are being gradually eroded," she says. "We have become emotionally stingy."
Papadopoulos believes people are hiding behind technology, often creating a smarter, wittier online persona that does not live up to the reality. Eoin Higgins of the Dubliner magazine learnt this lesson when he recently met up with a woman he first encountered in a chatroom three years ago.
"We had a close online relationship," he says of blonde Iza who came to visit him in Dublin. "When we met in the flesh, we hadn't much to say because we had typed everything already. The gaps in conversation which we'd previously filled with surfing the net or texting friends now had to be filled with interesting, meaningful chat, or at least comfortable silence. We couldn't even achieve that - we just didn't click."
Higgins acknowledges they had both "fallen for our online identities, not our real selves". At one point during the visit Iza went into an internet cafe and logged on to instant messenger. "I was at work and was logged on too," says Higgins.
"Our chat instantly went back to the snappy repartee we always had online. When we met later that evening, we were again stuck for words and we both started finding reasons to text other people just to fill in the voids in our conversation."
SOME BELIEVE OUR deteriorating social skills should be blamed on the fact that our every need and desire is now anticipated and catered for. "Younger people in particular live in such a cushy comfort zone that they are rarely pushed outside it," says PR executive Sinead Ryan.
One young Galwegian social butterfly who didn't want to be named suggested that, increasingly, people are determined not to appear needy in a social situation. "These days nobody wants to look as though they are trying desperately to make new friends," she says.
Ryan contends that some people she knows would be horrified by the thought of being in a social situation with those outside their own age range or, even worse, from a different social background. Ask them to define socialising, and "they'll say it's going to the same places, with the same group of people, from the same social set, every single time they go out," says Ryan.
"While it may appear that we communicate and interact more than ever before - texting, e-mailing, blogging, beboing, MySpacing or YouTubing - it's actually much less challenging, and a lot less fun than just walking up to a stranger at a party and saying 'hello'. It may be old-fashioned but it still works."
Join in: party tips
• Use the same body language as the person you are talking to
• Maintain eye contact
• Go to a party armed with good conversation tit-bits
• If you don't have a head for names and faces say "it's nice to see you" rather than "meet you", this can save red faces if you've met them before
• When joining a group make sure your glass is half full so going to the bar can be used as an escape route