Many of us have heard about the key role that the internet and social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, etc, played in the recent series of demonstrations and uprisings throughout much of the Middle East. Who would have expected that what just five years ago was some humorous website shared among friends could now morph into a tool capable of aiding such events? We also saw how the government of Egypt panicked and “pulled the plug” on the country’s internet (or at least tried, though it didn’t work very well).
All this news follows a great milestone for the internet — the internet will in a few days be running out of IP Addresses, and so will have to begin adding digits in order to accommodate the great increase in website generation. Facebook now has over half a billion members, and is rivaling Google in the number of unique hits per month. What’s the future of the internet and social media and is it a good thing that they are playing an increasingly essential role in our lives?
The internet and social media have really been gaining the most speed in the past five years to ten years, as web-surfing becomes more integrated into people’s lives and we suddenly all try to remember what life was like before we got Facebook.
Naysayers to the internet and social media will be decrying how it is driving us away from what our social lives were like just fifty years ago as they proudly brag that they refuse to get a Facebook or only use it once a month. Yet because of their Luddite pride, they are missing out on a human transformation on the level of the creation of electricity.
Think about it for a second — if you didn’t have Facebook, IM or e-mail (yes, there are still a few select people who refuse to learn how to use e-mail), how are you going to communicate with people who aren’t directly around you at all times? Spend hours licking envelopes and mailing letters?
Trying repeatedly to call them and playing phone-tag? Suddenly you begin losing touch with a lot of your old friends and contacts. Now, with the advent of the internet into our social lives, rather than as a solitary recreation as long before, it’s easy to stay in touch.
It is not only easy to stay in touch, but also to make new connections. The world is a very inter-connected place and often someone you meet might already know someone you know. Without something like Facebook, you would never know you had “mutual friends.” This makes it so you seem more connected already and sometimes breaks the ice. And if you’re in an organizational role where you need to contact people across vast distances, then the way the modern internet and social media works is ideal.
You can easily message someone from the other side of the country to establish a partnership or whatnot, but the difference between this and e-mail is that having an active Facebook profile (with your interests, posts from friends, photos of your life, etc.) establishes your credibility in a way a simple e-mail address can’t. Even governments, politicians, non-profits and businesses have realized the power of social media in reaching their constituents and customers in a non-intrusive and cost-effective method, which is why nearly every legitimate one of those types of groups now has a Facebook account, page or group.
This phenomenon is what we saw in the uprisings in the Middle East — organizers from across the country who never met became steadfast allies and worked together to coordinate the protests. They had never met face-to-face before then and might still not meet for many years, if ever.
Not only can you do this from across countries, but from across the world — for example, the Facebook event “A Virtual ‘March of Millions’ in Solidarity with Egyptian Protestors” as of today has over 850,000 people “attending” with four million “Awaiting Reply.” That’s the power of social media.
Of course there are downsides to social media as well. They appeal to certain instincts in humans that can make it insanely addictive and suddenly you find yourself on Facebook when you should be doing homework. Also the lack of face-to-face contact can certainly change the way our social relationships feel at times.
These are downsides, which is why when you use social media you need a strong discipline and key awareness of what your purpose is in using them. And of course some things you post on social media will be there for a very long time; possibly forever, leading to an immense variety of possible consequences in the future. And of course, there is the issue of information privacy, for which Facebook has been embroiled in the occasional scandal.
Yet in the end, what I say is that all these downsides are minute and can be easily eliminated through simply knowing what you’re doing. The benefits of social media are far too great to not use them. It’s like refusing to live in New York City because you don’t like the traffic — just be smart about it and be able to control yourself.
Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Friendster, Tumbler, Myspace, Wikipedia (in a way), online web communities, forums, etc. — many of these social media outlets began just a few years ago but have now grown to unprecedented sizes, seemingly overnight. Is this a bubble? I don’t think so, as many of these services are free and have found ways to remain profitable or at least profit-neutral.
No one will refuse an almost completely free lunch, so besides the occasional technology-hater, few people are going to be able to completely disconnect themselves from social media once they are on.
This is, to put it simply, the way the world is going. Jump on the boat, or, in the words of the Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder, although considering he’s now more famous than everyone except for maybe President Obama I doubt there are introductions needed) in the movie “The Social Network” (part of which was filmed at Hopkins!) “you’re going to be left behind.” It’s good, it’s free, why not?
