A Nielsen Online report says two thirds of us now use what it calls "Member Communities," which includes both social networks and blogs. MCs now make up "the fourth most popular category online – ahead of personal email," says Nielsen Online.
The thing about this that I find striking is that email is a personal, one-on-one sort of thing. What social networking sites do is open your communication to any number of people.
You can look at this two ways:
First of all, you can say, "Well, this is good if people need to get their information to many people at once."
The second way of looking at it (and the one I follow) is to say, "Well, that's what the cc: and bcc: fields are for."
What the social networking revolution has done is allow people to be their own personal information dissemination machine.
ANT IS EATING LUNCH. ANT CAN'T SHAKE THIS COLD. ANT IS WATCHING THE MARLINS LOSE. And so on. It feeds into the personal need of wanting to be interesting, wanting to be wanted.
The benefit of this incessent twittering and facebook status changing (both activities I am unashamedly guilty of) is that unlike an email, social networking is easy to ignore. You don't recieve a thing that you have to open, read, and delete. You can just sort of skim your feeds:
PAIGE IS GOING TO THE FESTIVAL!!! "Who cares?" *scroll scroll scroll*
MATT IS WATCHING HOW IT'S MADE, IT RULES "Yeah it does!" *scroll scroll scroll*
What this means is:
a. Information has to become more succinct. Enforced brevity means that whatever you have to say better be interesting, or at the very least witty, for people to take notice of it
b. Whatever people have to say becomes less in-depth. There's no room to actually say anything of real substance. All you get is "what I'm up to at this moment in 149 characters or fewer."
As opposed to a blog, where you can go in depth into issues. Nobody does, but the option's there.
Social networking, not surprisingly, is also affecting the way real-life networking works.
It's not just the internet but the media as a whole that affects the way people interact in the real world. Ours is a generation that communicates by quoting movies and tv-shows at one another. Back in the day this sort of thing was reserved for Monty Python fans. Now everybody does it.
Same thing with the internet. Last week I changed my Facebook status to:
ANT IS ON A BOAT (F. T-PAIN)
Inside of, like, 45 minutes I had responses:
- I got my flippy-floppies!!
- This is old
- OMG I LOVE THIS SONG HA HA HA
- I fucked a mermaid!
and so on.
And what do you think happened the first time I saw the people who commented on this? We started talking about the "I'm On A Boat" song. Unreal. It's no longer "How's the weather?" or "You going to that thing tomorrow?" that we use as icebreakers, it's "WHY DIDN'T YOU POKE ME BACK :( :( :(" before the actual conversations start.
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