We have all seen how rapidly all of the social networks are growing. Myspace and facebook are just 2 in a sea of endless networks. Nowadays you can find a social network to cater to any niche you are interested in. So with all the extra time that we are spending on like making “friends, connections, fans, and followers,” are people really being brought together or are they just living under a technology facade that is actually keeping them apart?
The trouble with a lot of social networks of course is that people can be anybody. You never really know for certain who you are talking to. Is Dan that picture that you see on his facebook profile? Does he really go to college? Well his profile says so, so it must be true. I suppose the same can be argued for meeting someone in person right? I mean people can pretend in real life just as well as they can pretend online, however, online it is just far easier to fake an identity and make yourself into anyone you want to be. The reasons for that is that your online identity relies on text and images, nowadays you can write whatever you want and find any picture you want. Those of you familiar with Seth Godin may have heard about his little story with twitter. Apparently Seth Godin was on twitter sharing his posts and talking to people, currently he has over 6,000 followers. The problem is, it’s not really Seth Godin that’s on twitter. Someone took his picture and some of his information, stuck it online and boom, Seth Godin is on twitter. This prompted Seth to write a post to his readers telling them that he is not the twitter Seth Godin. How else would we know?
Let’s look at something else for a moment, time. Now, do you think people spent more time out and about meteing people 10 years ago then they do now? and do you think social networks had something to do with that? So my question to you is, are social networks actually taking the SOCIAL aspect away? Sure we can browse peoples profiles (that we must trust) and chat with them online, but the quality of the connection is just not as strong as an in person connection (in my opinion). Terms like friends and fans are becoming cliche, does a “friend” really mean something anymore? Now, to get a friend all you have to do is go on facebook and click a button, is that what we call a friend? My point with all of this is that social networks are a great way to spend time online and to meet people (online!) but let’s not forget about the real world, let’s not forget what a friend really is.
There are of course other issues with social networks such as the “me generation,” check out the “twitter whore” below to find out what I mean.
Part 1
Part 2
Is this what we are cultivating and encouraging now? This is a topic for another post, but in short the answer is yes, for some people, however it not fair to make this generalization for all people who use a social media platforms.
Ask yourself a few questions, have you made more friends (real friends, or whatever you call a friend) since you started using social media platforms? Are the quality of your online friends the same online as they are offline?
I just wonder if we may be spending too much time online and not enough time offline with real people.
So what do you think, are social networking bringing us together, or keeping us apart?
Thanks for reading
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