You can't turn around without running into social media any more. We've got movies about it, Time magazine made its most successful promoter its Man of the Year this year. I saw a letter in Dear Abby the other day where a son told his mother the only way he would be giving her any details about the grandkid was if she joined a social network. No profile, no photos or stories to share at bridge club Grandma.
I'll admit that I kind of like some of the social media. Oh all right I'll admit, I enjoy Facebook. It's one of the first things I check in the morning, I have the app for it on my iPhone and I check it before I call it a day. And that grossly underestimates the number of times I check it during the day. At the same it makes me feel a bit uneasy sometimes. If you haven't drunk the Kool-Aid yet and are wondering if it's just you here's some reassurance.
It's not just you.
Late last year late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel declared a "National De-Friend Day" because he realized that social networks like Facebook put an emphasis on things that aren't really important. And creates "friends" out of people that are just acquaintances or sometimes even people you just really don't like. Maybe we do need to treat the concept of friend with a little more respect.
Beyond Kimmel you'll find the real inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is also no fan of social networks. He sees the Facebook approach of walling in information as a threat to the very essence of what he had created. A closed network goes against the very ideas that were behind creating the web in the first place. It was to be wide open, a vast shared resource where our information would be ours to control.
I worry about folks who think they have privacy on the web. I also worry about people who think that people you only know on Facebook constitute "family". While technology has raced ahead in our ability to connect to one another the basic human method of creating community hasn't changed. We need to be careful about the level of emotional investment we place on our online relationships. While those relationships can be profound, they are also much more complicated and diverse. That means they need their own emotional ranking system.
Digital communication has the ability to isolate and alienate. Now it's attempting to fill that void with relationships that may not offer the depth we expect. Handled carefully the social network can be a great addition to our lives. Handled with less care and we may find greater problems lurk just below the surface.
Call that the View From the Phlipside.
"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY. You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010
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