He and a friend were discussing how social media is a disconnector and not a reconnector.
A very thought-provoking argument, Michael. Challenge accepted!
The root argument is this...are we relying on social media to supplant social interaction?
Let's think about the oldest form of social media there was before social media.
Huh?
I'm getting around to that. Just humor me for a moment.
The church was the cornerstone of every community. It was the place to gather for worship, and fellowship before and after the Sunday (temple on Saturday) service. With the rise of electronic media and more secular thinking among today's society, the church is slowly losing its grip on that. And churches have been around for...well, forever.
Oh, let's also not forget the stay-at-home Mom. America's social calendar personified.
Then came newspaper. The telephone. Radio and television. Then the personal computer.
While there is some debate over whether or not IBM co-founder Thomas J. Watson Sr. actually said "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" in 1943, I doubt even he would have believed that these devices, once large enough to fill an entire floor of an office building, would have shrunk to the size of a notebook, with similar capabilities found on cellular telephones, and be available in just about every home worldwide.
It began in the 1970s following the introduction of the microprocessor, though the personal computer as we know it today would not begin entering homes until the start of the 1980s.
Even then, the devices were used for little more other than playing games or as word processors. The latter would eventually supplant typewriters, though some of those devices are still in use today.
With the increase in the number of personal computers entering homes, then came the internet.
The internet as we know it today has been around for a little more than two decades now. However, the concept of networking computers with one another had been around for at least two decades prior to that, though limited in scope to only government, educational, and scientific entities. As more computers entered homes in the 1980s, more 'hackers' found ways to infiltrate computer networks if they were fortunate enough to own a dial-up modem.
Then someone thought of a way to bring the hackers out of hiding. Thus the birth of the World Wide Web.
While some hackers are still underground, others are working legitimately to combat what they had become experts at over the years and now getting paid for it. The birth of the IT department.
Email was praised as a means for those who didn't have the time to devote to sitting down, finding a piece of paper and envelope, go to the post office and get stamps and THEN put the finished product in a mailbox for pickup the next day. Once you bought your monthly subscription to AOL, you could visit any of the free email sites and set up your own account immediately.
I've had my hotmail address for 15 years now.
You could start a letter to a friend, and if you didn't have time to finish, you could save the draft and return to it later, then finish and send it off.
Those who didn't like to write letters now found themselves with time to email. Even those who highly valued the art of penmanship like my mother (who is a left-handed calligraphy artist), found themselves having to assimilate to electronic mail if they intended to stay in touch with family and friends across the miles.
Some even took this a step further and spent the money needed to develop their own website, make money with it by doing something they enjoyed (blogging, photography, selling of crafts, etc.) and quit their hated day jobs.
Entertainers also plied their trades through websites of their own. But what was left for those who couldn't afford a site of their own, yet still wanted to share their lives with others?
Enter Facebook, MySpace, Twitter.
And we'll touch on that next week.
NEXT WEEK: Part II
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