EBlog
Should it be “kinda social media”?
February 29, 2008 | Posted by: Lee
They call it "social" media - all those conversations, affinity groups, bookmarking things going on online. But I think part of the reason it's all the rage is that it's only kind of social.
I get many of the benefits of interacting with people, but I can do it on my own terms, and in privacy (humm....I can be social in private?).
- When I engage in an online conversation, I have time to think about my reaction, reword it, tone it down (or up), then respond when I want.
- No one sees my "What the heck are you talking about face".
- I don't have to ask someone to repeat what they said, I can just reread it.
- I can look for other sources to back up my opinions and add those to my thoughts (making me sound oh so much smarter).
- If I don't understand something I can quickly learn more (making me sound more informed and educated).
- If someone asks a question, I'm not forced to answer it. I only have to answer the questions I want, when I want to.
I can't do that in person.
So in many ways social media allows me to be social in a safer way than I can in person. I can be more thoughtful, more informed, and more helpful (or at least I can pretend that I am.)
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Categorized in: Web-Centric, Social Media
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Comments
March 03 2008 - 10:05 PM | by Nicholas
I think what you describe is in many ways why the entire internet is so popular. There’s little available online that isn’t offline, but it’s available when, where, and how you want it.
To be honest, many of the social networking sites are about as social as sending a letter. (i.e. Not very.) Twitter is the only one that comes close to being real-time enough to not be called “sorta social” in my view.
The other thing I’ve come to realize is that the social aspect of some of these sites is actually a competition to see how many friends you can acquire. The emphasis is on how many friends or connections you have, not the depth of the relationships or how much you actually communicate with these friends.
And I see very few actual conversations being had on these sites. And no, disjointed and random Facebook wall posts don’t count, IMO. In many ways, old-school discussion forums (and the BBS’s of way back when) are much more actually social (and engaging to me) than the current wave of so-called social networking sites.