It's another Blog Off: do social sites like Facebook connect or isolate?
So today's another Blog Off, an event where bloggers of all stripes weigh in on the same topic. This week's topic is "Do social sites like Facebook connect the world or isolate people?" The topic was spawned by a flawed scrap of research that the mainstream media pounced on like vultures on road kill. Never mind that the research in question amounted to a poll conducted by an undergraduate of her peers in a psych class . What mattered was the finding that Facebook is a magnet for narcissists and self-haters equally. Because no one seems to understand statistics or how to construct a logical argument, headlines exploded in August. Within days, the conventional wisdom had jumped to yet another flawed assumption. Namely that Facebook causes narcissism.
From the Telegraph
Facebook affords a really perfect placing for narcissists to display their appearance and what number of ?Friends? They have got, the observe said, because it allows them to thrive on ?Shallow? Relationships at the same time as averting true warmth and empathy.From The Toronto Star
Compelled to tell your 500 Facebook friends every time you can?T locate your sun shades? Want the arena to recognize you seem like Robert Pattison? Post new Photoshopped photographs every day?
You, my buddy, are narcissistic and insecure.
I may want to pass on and listing charges and again hyperlinks for days but you notice my factor. The mainstream media seems to be threatened by social media, the brand new child on the block, and the outcomes are predictable.
I have my percentage of issues with Facebook. I think about it as a cul de sac at the World Wide Web. It's the new AOL I tell people all of the time. Facebook is a duplicated, smaller model of the internet and despite the reality that it connects people from their respective pasts and offers, the best thing it isolates is human beings from their futures. I'll get to that during a minute but I love having a domain in which I can capture up with my nieces and nephews, my siblings, vintage pals from high college and college and the rest. But my beyond is my past for a cause. It's first-rate to hang around there every now and then however it would not help me get to in which I want to head. I assume it is Facebook's Achilles' heel by means of the manner and it will be what does it in. It's all but not possible to satisfy new humans there.
I do not know approximately anyone else, however my life has been completely and fully converted through social media. I report most of it on Facebook, however none of this change begins there. For me it started with Blogger.
Two-and-a-half of years in the past I become an unknown designer in a second-tier town tucked along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. Thanks to the kick begin I were given from my Blogger weblog, here I sit as a few type of an industry notion chief (I hate that time period) with a community of friends, colleagues and buddies that spans the globe. My involvement with Blogger, and later Twitter has brought me face to face with an amazing variety of those colleagues and pals. From the first half of 2010 by myself right here are a few of my non-public/ expert connections.
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| Kelly Morrisseau writes the blog KitchenSync . She is the first designer/ blogger who ever reached out to me as a new blogger and we've maintained a a strong friendship ever since. Here we are in New York last February. |
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| This is the community of design bloggers as it looked last winter. That photo was taken at a cocktail party in New York hosted by Brizo faucets and Manning, Selvage and Lee Public Relations last February. |
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| Here's Saxon Henry, me, Sabrina Velandry, Paul Velandry, Johnny Grey, Chuck Wheelock and Andie Day. We met on Twitter and we're sitting in the first and second rows of a Fashion Week fashion show. We've been brought together by Brizo because we're design bloggers. |
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| This is me speaking at the Kitchen and Bath Industry Show (KBIS) in Chicago last April. I got to that spot because a year-and-a-half ago Google itself found me via my blog and pulled me out of the scrum. They recommended me to Masco and fast forward a few months and there I am speaking at Kraftmaid's KBIS booth. |
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| This is Zoe Voight and I putting out inside the press room at a change display. I'm in the press room as a credentialed journalist because any person at Veeder Perman Public Relations loves me and loves my blog. |
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| Here's a gaggle of design bloggers at a seminar backed by means of @brizo. |
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| Here I am giving some other communicate at some other trade show, the Southeast Builder's Conference this time. Masco is paying me to deliver a speak on how a good deal my blog has modified my lifestyles. Pinch me. |
Everything it really is taking place in those pics, all of these non-public connections, had been made feasible via my social media presence. When I hear claims that I'm similarly remoted I laugh on the absurdity of it.
As my travel agenda starts to take form for 2011 I simply shake my head. On the internal I nonetheless think of myself as that unknown clothier in a second-tier metropolis. Based at the activities where I'll be speakme, it is quite clear that that's not the case.
Social media web sites make the arena a smaller location. They present an possibility for real, personal connections that go beyond geography to a degree and with an immediacy it's in no way been viable within the entire of human records. Social media typically and Twitter in particular, is in which I locate my future.
As is the case with anything, thew only thing social site offer is a set of tools. By the time sites like Facebook grow to the size they are (they claim 500 million members worldwide) people are bound to abuse those tools and some people can find themselves more isolated. But just as is the case with anything, it's not automatic. Facebook doesn't cause anything but compromised privacy. People who are thrown to narcissism or isolation are going to be those things with or without social media sites. All of that is a distraction from what's possible though. Better than anything I know, social media takes what's possible and makes it what's probable. As I look forward to the career shifts, adventures and challenges headed my way in the next few months I can't help but say that I owe all of it to Blogger, Twitter, YouTube, Posterous and yes, even Facebook. Me isolated? Don't make me laugh.
As part of a Blog Off, you can go to the official site and see the links to all of participating bloggers' posts. As the day goes on, I'll start listing them here as well.