What does social media technologies mean to you?
If I should answer that question a couple of years ago the answer would be simple; not much at all. But ask me now and the answer would be completely different, today social media technologies is something that I use daily.
There are a flood of different social sites on the Internet today and I am not a frequent user of them all. Frankly I can say that I use very few of them but the ones I like, I really like!
In the global society of today we connect and meet so much more people compared to just a few decades ago. We have the opportunity to travel a lot and see the world which makes our social connections even larger. These connections would be impossible to maintain if there wouldn’t be for social media technologies. For me Facebook is probably the best example of a social site like this. I visit Facebook a lot, it has almost become like a form of every day routine. The purpose of using this site is to keep the connections with new and old friends that would have been to exhausting to keep up in the old fashion way. I mean who writes a letter these days, and a phone call can seem a little bit too personal if the person is not a close friend.
As a student I also find Google docs as a simplifying tool to work with when producing texts along with my classmates when working in groups. Just the fact that everyone can write there piece from home and doesn’t have to meet together in person to join the work makes the process easier.
Other kinds of social sites like Wikipedia and Youtube are also webpages that I visit regularly to seek information or just to get a few laughs.
But although I am a fan of these social media technologies I can’t help wondering; does this process of increasing our capability of connecting with more people instead has the effect of making us unsocial? It depends how you define the concept of social. Who is more social; a person with over a 1000 connections on the Internet or a person with 10 really close “reality” friends? Do I get the same satisfaction of talking to a friend over MSN as I would have got in real life? This is questions that probably would get many different answers depending on who you are asking.
I feel the same, i mean do u get the same satisfaction from having 1000 friends on facebook, that u get from 10 real life friends. I mean think about do you get the same experience when you go out with your friends to a bar for a drink, you sit there look at other people talk laugh, as when you sit at home alone with a glass of wine in front of the computer with your friend on the other side of the line. Are our minds that easy to trick and our bodies that easy to replace, when i think about it I get a bit scared, are we humans going to be replaced in the future? Are we going to end up lonely and miserable, with only one person to share our life with, the computer? But I think as you said no matter what we do or were we go we can’t escape these development of the human mind; communities, we go to get information, to laugh and to socialize. This is the time of digitalization and our only option is to somehow accept these technologies and go with the flow.
ReplyDeleteBy Tala