The Treachery of Social Media

Firstly, a special thanks to Dr Anna Tarrant for her wonderful article on blogging for academics. It got me thinking again about a passion of mine. Recently, when somebody asked me what exactly is it that I research, I had to give this a good long think. I have recently submitted my Master’s thesis, so naturally, life is still a bit of a blur. However, I was finally able to conclude (some three days later) that my research, and my passion, is focused on the intersection between technology and society. Broad, isn’t it?! Still, as you can imagine, a blog post on blogging really piqued my interest. After all, blogs, as a form of social media, sit within that very intersection between the technological and the social worlds.

But then again, is there even a meaningful distinction between the two? I mean to say, even within our own vocabularies, words like Google, Facebook, Twitter, blog and YouTube have become commonplace. For those who are engaged with social media (a great number of those who use the Internet), it has pervaded much of your lives. Many people I meet avidly deny this, but let’s be honest with ourselves here, can you really tell me that as a social media user, you have not experienced at least one time where it hasn’t provided something that traditional media didn’t? Sometimes you could even be just a passive recipient of important information that has made a difference. A friend of mine found out via Facebook that his daughter (who lives in Australia) had got engaged. Why has this happened? Well, it’s cheaper for one; international calling costs money, but once you become Internet-connected, a Facebook message is free, no matter where the recipient lives.

So why then, if social media is so rosy, do I have such a melodramatic title for my article? Social media, and in particular social networking, is a very powerful tool for conveying information and sharing ideas across a large network of people. When the focus of the connections (social networking is all about connections, after all) is information and idea sharing, such as in the case of the previous author, the connections are (more often than not) very constructive. But what about if the focus of the connections is the connection itself? Take Facebook for example: it is an online social networking platform that allows any two or more individuals to connect with each other from anywhere in the world as “friends”. So what? Well, for many who use Facebook, the number of “friends” one has can be an indicator of how popular or unpopular they are within their social circles, with some people collecting thousands of these “friends”. The focus on forming those connections is for the sake of those connections; to be connected.

So how does one manage all of these simultaneous, uncontrolled connections? The short answer is that we can’t. One of my favourite authors, Manuel Castell’s (The Rise of the Network Society), proposed that we as individuals are both the most connected and the most isolated we have been in all human history. What a seemingly paradoxical statement that is! As social creatures, we have the innate desire to form connections to fulfil our social needs. Online social networking allows us to readily (and cheaply) form and discard these faux friendships and weak connections at will. But with so much focus given to forming more connections, we have had to sacrifice the strength, value and meaning of those connections. Interpersonal relationships gain their meaning from the challenge of forming them in the first place! As one of my research participants told me, “the Internet does not provide social nourishment” and that these connections are actually toxic to our social needs. And how ironic that I should be voicing this on a social media site! For me, many questions remain. How can we reconcile this mass of connectedness and still live within a connected society? Has this connectedness in fact eroded society? Or are we simply transitioning into a new societal paradigm?

Author: Nathan Bromberg