Chat and reality: how virtual communication changes our lives

From text messaging apps to a variety of social media, virtual communication is now part of our everyday lives. However, like everything else, it is also essential to understand how to use these means of communication properly. Gabriele Balbi, Pro-Rector for Education and Students' Experience at USI and full professor at the Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society, discussed the issue in the Ticino7 magazine.

Nowadays, we all own a mobile phone and we can probably find among the various installed apps WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and others. Applications that, in one way or another, have a very useful function: to chat. What encourages us to use these chats is the 'mediation of a screen between people, which helps to overcome any initial shyness, the thrill of often interacting with strangers, and, especially in initial chats, the relativity of the physical distance between one person and the other,' explains Gabriele Balbi, sociologist and programme director of the Bachelor in Communication.

Chats are therefore an effective tool for communicating with people, and their use in everyday life (whether for a simple greeting or organising an activity) has resulted in the lines between the real and virtual worlds becoming blurred, rendering the two worlds complementary. So, for example, it becomes 'difficult, if not impossible, to maintain a relationship, especially a romantic relationship, that is exclusively virtual. Sooner or later the desire (and the need) to meet takes over'.

Therefore, there are also suggestions for chat use: remember that one often communicates with people thousands of kilometres away and the time spent on social networking should remain reasonable. However, it should not be forgotten that times and habits change, but history often repeats itself, and if in the past there were those who warned against the hours spent in front of the TV, there are now those who 'do so for the time spent online.Tomorrow who knows...' Professor Balbi concludes.

The full interview is available here.