I stumbled upon this article of the real value of social media "Value of Social Media" and began to wonder. Social media’s value in real life has been exacerbated by the invasive and gossipy nature of people. I am shocked that more feature films don’t often mention Facebook or Twitter in conversation the way it happens in my day-to-day life. Television shows have caught onto this idea, often slipping in a “like” joke or a complaint about a status update. Ten years ago, this would have been irrelevant, completely unfathomable; imagine publicly announcing and commenting on every e-mail chain letter you ever got in your inbox back in the nineties, when it was all the rage. To assign a monetary value to social media would be a lot like quantifying the meaning of life. “Klout” or power one acquires through virtual online networking and it is measured by the force of all of the social media outlets one utilizes combined. But in real life, it just means you spend an awful lot of time on the computer. Social media is valuable in that it makes it incredibly easy to find information and “get in touch” with people around the world, except that it defeats the entire purpose of being social, which is to be with people, doing social things. We are after all, human beings, not human doings.
Hi Sonia,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post. I enjoyed the video in the article. There has been a lot of conversation about the negatives and positives of social media. My interest is psychology, and I have been following the psychological effects of social media. And even in that case, I found that social media can be both positive and negative. One interesting study showed that the more engaged we are in social media the more we take away from it. Although the study was looking at depression, I think it hold true in all uses of social media. LIke you mentioned in your post, social media is here to stay and what matters is that we make the most use of it and engage in it - creating online relationships and communities.
interesting thoughts, Galia! Do you mind posting the study you're referring to? Sounds super cool!
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