Personally, I am not that into social media technologies like most of the young generations are. To me, they are just tools to make me keep in touch with friends and family in a convenient but uncomfortable way. I think there are two main reasons why the social media technologies may make me feel uncomfortable.
1. Keeping in touch but also keeping a distance
Social media applications enables people update their own information and have the access to get others’ information that’s in their social media network. However, too much information is not a good thing sometimes. It may lead people relying on the digital and cold statements that somehow reveal people’s life and thoughts. That is to say, the way people get in touch with each other include several senses, the information they communicate, their voices, their expressions, their feelings etc, but social media technologies mostly only enable us to get the information, and make us too much rely on it and unconsciously ignore other senses. As a consequence, people call and meet each other less, instead, visit their blogs and websites more. Yes, we are able to get in touch with friends and family no matter how far they are, as long as we both have the access to the internet, but are we truly closer?
2. Time-consumed
Social media technologies are time-consumed and not effective. As we have a lot of information about the people we know, it will also take a lot of time to deal with them and the information we want is immingled among all. For example, some of my friends and I already got use to check the social media network like every 3 hours, we seldom get useful information but it takes time and energy. In addition, social media technologies needed to be integrated and cooperated. Like MSN Spaces, Facebook, Tagged, Flixter, Blogspot etc, also some local social media applications, for example, we have QQ, Xiaonei, Kaixin, Twitter and so on in China. All of them have similar or inclusive functions. That brought troubles like where I should post the information, all of them, some of them or simply one of them when someone got such need. It would be great if they are connected and associated.
To sum up, with the development of social media technologies, people gradually changed their way to communicate and connected. They did enable us do something we are not able to do in the past. But they also bring questions we have to think about. Like how we should apply these technologies in the best way for human beings, in order to have a better life with fewer side effects.
Xiwei Mu
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3 comments:
well, my comment on you second point "Social media technologies are time-consumed and not effective. " is that if there is no social media technologies we will still spend the time on arcade games which, cost much more money:)
Xiwei,
I guess many of us agree that SMT doesn't make a very good help at bringing people closer. The reason#1 in your post makes a good point showing that we may forget to reflect about important aspects in our daily lives. I want to read more of this, because the problem is kind of subtle but not lacking parallells I think.
For instance, most of us already stopped reflecting upon using wired telephone and probably neither the cell phone. How about them? Do they also reduce numbers of channels(my technical interpretation of cold statements) in interpersonal communication? If you ask me, I would say yes, because they take away the body language and mimics. It is just like you said about digital communication, we have to guess each other's feelings (if body language is relevant in your culture).
Your reason#2 may also have parallells with the phone. I know people who have their time wasted by friends who calls over and over saying the same things.
It's tempting for me to say "let's hope that future SMT will be multi-modal and time-efficient", but your ending words should be more relevant: We need to think of how we should apply these technologies. So, how did we think about the phone?
I actually agree that Social Media Technologies does not make people come closer together but it truly make people who do not have that much contact to have a little contact. By doing so SMT encourages people to have a little contact with a lot of people at the same time. Compared to the traditional way of communicating by phone where you only usually communicate with only one person, SMT allows you to communicate with more people. You do not really get the same personal contact as by phone when using any messenger and I would rather call a person if I had something important or personal to tell. Thus SMT can work as a casual communication forum, for communication that isn’t actually necessary but rather optional and just for passing time.
I also agree with you that there are a lot of security issues to consider. Especially the fact that people can hack and abuse others identity on the net. I see this as a big problem and think that this should be taken under consideration while developing new Social Media Technologies. Only if you can guarantee peoples integrity can you make tomorrows technology interesting.
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