Frak Yeah Social Media!

Living the i-life: humanity in the social networking age

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. 
Albert Einstein 

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation. 
Jean Arp 

Mark Zuckerberg has a lot to answer for. The arrival of Facebook revolutionised the ways in which people communicate, and the era of social networking brings with it a brave new world of online etiquette and cyber-manners. Many media pundits are quick to blame the likes of Facebook and Twitter for stunting our communication, replacing old fashioned methods such as talking face-to-face with a lexicon of abbreviated text-speak, 140 character summaries and poking people as an acceptable greeting.

It cannot be denied that the social networking environment has had a drastic effect on how we connect with other people, and on how we present ourselves to the world. Social networking allows us to self-promote like never before. Suddenly, the thoughts, opinions and musings that would once have been confined between the pages of a moleskin are blogged to a worldwide audience of readers; suddenly, the dialogue of a conversation has been replaced with a polemic diatribe of status updates that are announced without concern for the formality of a listener. The old adage that speakers only listen to another’s story in order that they can then, in turn, tell their own story, has been thrown out of the window; people can announce their own anecdotes without even a passing thought for anybody else’s experiences. The Facebook generation seems increasingly self-concerned, blogging, tweeting and updating primarily for their own gratification.

However, for all the troubling aspects of communication in the age of social networking, the incredible possibilities and unbounded potential are all too often overlooked. Humanity is connected in a way it never has been before. The internet spans millions of miles, and, for all its faults, Facebook allows people to keep in contact like never before. The world has not been made smaller, simply less remote. Not only this; the social networking age also provides an equality and egalitarianism of communication that has never been seen before. The media no longer controls opinion; we are no longer reliant on advertising to tell us what we need to know about the products we buy; celebrities are slaves no more to the gossip pages of glossy mags. In this, I suspect, lays the essence of the media’s constant attempts to discredit or throw suspicion on social networking sites; their very existence threatens the stranglehold of the media on public opinion. Fans no longer need to buy that magazine in order to find out what their favourite celebrity thinks or does; they simply follow them on twitter and cut out the middle man altogether. Consumers no longer need to rely on what the advert claims a product will provide; a quick poll on Facebook or a search on twitter will name and shame unfulfilled brand promises. And in the blogosphere, anybody can publish their writing without pandering to the requirements of editors or publishers.

For my part, the vast and ever-evolving landscapes that social networking is opening up for us provide more opportunities than downsides. Far from criticising, we should be celebrating what Facebook and Twitter can do for us, and investigating the potentialities they hold for our methods of communication. Our fears and suspicion of technology seem to be rooted in the imagined threat that machines will slowly take over and erase what makes us human, forgetting that whatever technological developments may occur, communication is at heart about people, reliant on its users. Perhaps, instead, we should ask how technology can amplify what makes us human and allow us to communicate in ever more wonderful ways.