Facebook and Twitter along with other social media outlets are great for promotion, marketing, and building brand loyalty for your company or business. However, is social media really as great as the world believes on an individual level? Or is it the beginning to the destruction of our humanity?
Only twenty years ago, schools focused on reading, writing and arithmetic. We wrote essays by hand and were tested on how well we could spell. We were taught to write in cursive and print neatly. As the age of the Internet and .com businesses started to arise, students started relying on computers to spell-check work, to complete mathematical equations, and stay connected to classmates with just a ping.
Only ten years ago, social media was as easy as AIM, where generation Y spent hours discussing nothing of real importance over Instant Messaging. Whole relationships were started and ended over AIM, and spelling became “HRU” or “BDE!” (‘How are you?’ and ‘Best day ever!’). Xanga broke out in 1998, where you could log every thought and idea for the world to comment on and read. In 2006, Myspace stole the scene with its emphasis on being a place for up-and-coming artists and bands to upload their music for everyone to listen to. For my generation, we used the new tools as a way to keep tabs on our friends and leave comments unreadable by adults. It was our own language that empowered our generation and helped blossom social networking sites.
As our generation grew older, words and sentences started to be typed in full and were left with the occasional “BRB” or “TTYL” (‘Be right back’ and ‘Talk to you later’). With the arrival of Facebook, younger generations rapidly followed us and third graders began carrying Blackberries to keep their posts on Facebook up-to-date. With Facebook’s increased popularity, Twitter emerged as the new “follow site,” where you can track every move of your favorite celebrity or sports team. Even my father, who is almost sixty, uses Twitter to follow updates on the San Jose Sharks. Bill Keller, New York Times executive editor, wrote in his article The Twitter Trap, “Twitter and YouTube are nibbling away at our attention spans.” It is not just our attention spans it is nibbling away but also our humanity.
Instead of dialing a phone number or running down the street to your best-friend’s house, one can tell the whole world “I kissed Jimmy Jones behind the bleachers!” or “I got a new dog” in two seconds by Tweeting or Facebooking. Technology has saturated our lives with Google, Twitter and Facebook. “Let’s go play” or “Let’s talk” turned into “Let’s Facebook” or “Just Google it.” What happened to the personal connections?
The benefit of social media: you can connect with your friends even if they are in Argentina for four months without a phone. However, the question is: is social media becoming taking away our humanity for the sake of swift electronic contact?