Published in The Hive- Sometime around April 2011
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In
his landmark essay, ‘Is Google making us stupid?’, Nicholas Carr discusses how
Google, and the Internet in general, has made us stupider as a species, ruined
our concentration power and has altered our psyche in a very short time. He
argues that nothing ever in the long history of human civilization has had such
an impact on our basic nature as much as the Internet has had in barely fifteen
years of its popular regime. But in the end he laments that nothing can be done
about it because we have already been engulfed in a media which puts efficiency
and immediacy above everything else.
Though
the essay does not deal explicitly with Social Media, it does explain the
impact of social media on this generation of people. Now, Social Media is a
phrase which is being heard a lot these days. Before we go further, we need to
explicitly understand what Social Media exactly is. Popular belief is that
Social Media just pertains to the Social Networking websites such as Facebook,
Twitter, Orkut, MySpace etc. But Social Media is much more than that. It ranges
from networking sites like mentioned before to Bookmarking websites such as
Del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon and from Video Sharing and blogging websites
such as YouTube and Blogger to the most popular encyclopedia on the Web,
Wikipedia. To understand this better, we have to break down the term Social
Media. Media is basically anything that lets the information out on a large
scale and traditional media usually functions as a pyramid, in a top-down
approach. Social Media on the other hand, is about giving the power of
expression to people. It is about giving everybody an equal chance to shout
their opinions, which Newspaper or Television has never been able to do before,
and let people express whatever they want to in their own words.
Like
every other technology that has taken this planet by storm, the power of the
web could not be appreciated until it grew out of bounds to be managed. But by
then it had already become the power of people for it to be exploited by a set
of few rich people. Social Media has it’s share of supporters and critics alike
and usually both within the same person. Before we discuss the cons, it’s high
time we appreciate it for what all it has done. To begin with, the Arab Spring
aka the Facebook/Twitter revolution owes heavily to the influence of Social
Media in those countries. The dictatorial regime could enforce censorship with
an iron fist on the traditional media but nothing could have been done about
the undercurrent of the uprising floating on the Web. Like one Egyptian
activist tweeted, “We used Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to
co-ordinate and YouTube to tell the world.” Another huge advantage of the
Social Media has been in the power of the individual. In his magnum opus, The
World is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman talks about the power of the individual in
today’s age thanks to the power he is given by websites like Blogger and
YouTube to state his views, anonymously if he wishes to. It is this power that
has turned people like Julian Assange to collaborate with thousands of
volunteers across the globe and get the truth out to the public through the
phenomenon that has been WikiLeaks. It is also this power to exhibit talent
that has made Justin Bieber, a seventeen year old kid who used YouTube as his
platform, one of America’s biggest superstars. Barack Obama has successfully
used Twitter to canvass during elections and it is only because of websites
like Del.icio.us that obscure but talented web entrepreneurs are getting their
share.
But
like every technology out there, Social Media too has it’s share of negatives,
the predominant among them being the issues of credibility and plagiarism as
well as the amount of time being wasted on sites like Facebook. For exactly the
same reasons as above for which Social Media has been lauded, it is also being
criticised. The power of Peer-to-Peer networking and Torrents is the biggest
problem the Creative Industry faces against piracy. The power of blogs has been
lauded upon but with so many news sources out there on the Web, the issues of
credibility crop up. How true is this news? And to re-check it, people are
still falling back to traditional media which is slower but more reliable.
True, Wikipedia is the largest and fastest growing encyclopedia out there but
are the facts in it true? Who can tally such a huge heap of data, with more
getting added to it every minute? And the biggest problem of them all is the
amount of time that is being spent on Social Networking sites updating
statuses, Liking pictures and watching home-made videos. The stats in this case
are alarming.
Despite
all this, the total man hours spent on Social Media are growing all the time.
And the fact that they will continue to do so is inevitable. We live in a World
where there is information multiplicity every year and all we can do is
understand and accept it. Only time can smoothen the process out.
2 comments:
"And the biggest problem of them all is the amount of time that is being spent on Social Networking sites updating statuses, Liking pictures and watching home-made videos. The stats in this case are alarming." Do you seriously mean this? Because I remember you once telling me, its hard to decide whats useful and what's a waste of time. It all boils down to how you would like to your time. Don't you think so?
I agree Social Media has its own share of side effects, but the one's you have pointed out here are not the one's I think are the major ones.
Yes, I said that it's hard to box things into categories and I still believe in it, but I guess I had to choose that tone keeping in mind the prospective audience for the piece.
Based upon my readings and observations, I came up with that list. If you could expand, or differ, on those points, it'd be great if you can elaborate.
Always up for a conversation.
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