Essay 4 - Social media for new social life?

The first thing related to social networks that is important to point out is the lack of attention. Just think that important companies have forbidden access to facebook or the use of messenger, just by closing it with a firewall. This means a waste of time, because people simply do other things ìnstead of their jobs. At work, personally, I could just use skype and of course for job purpose and no more. To be clear: this doesn't mean that somenone controls you; it's just that you cannot do some things not properly related to your work.

It's clearly something misleading your attention, because on work place you have just to work. Don't forget of course that sharing ideas can simply enrich our experience. It's easy to take someone other's idea and develop it, taking advantage of advices given by anybody: it's like a great community, where the sum is bigger than the simple addition. This is simply great, but we have to consider all the side effect that can emerge. For example if we are in trouble with a software or, in general, we want a deep look on a question we simply look for an idea on google. Is this really good? Perhaps, beacuse we can share opinion, but maybe we just don't use our brain and instead use blindly other's brain. So we are back again to quality problem, discussed before... Especially if we just consider the great amount of information actually on internet.

However the great innovation taken by the social media technology is that it has simply changed the way we communicate. It has changed the way we keep in touch. Maybe it's changed evene the way we consider someone "a friend". Let's consider Facebook: we add "friends", but considering all the people that we added, are they really friends? Maybe they're just people we know, so the friendship concept itself is sort of reviewed. We can consider this friend near us, but just on internet: in real life, where will be they? So, is our life becoming more virtual-oriented and sort of less real? I hope not, but I'm not so sure. Just consider that people doesn't talk anymore about sports on the stadium, but maybe they just see the sport events on streaming and talk about it on a specialized forum. How many people acted this way ten years ago? I think this is quite amazing, expecially if we consider that sport is social aggreation. The same for cinema; the great director Sam Peckinpah said that one of the most powerful thing of the cinema is that it is a social experience, because people share the same place and the same movie. Are we loosing it? Maybe: it's like we are going to that way. And I don't think it's a good news.

Maybe Internet in general, and social media technology in particular, are seen like a dream: we can do everything (illegal things too), we can find everything, we can se everything, but where is all this bringing us? Are we thinking about it?

We trust more and more everything that's on internet: maybe we have to be a bit more careful and start wondering what's rear the facade.


Giuliano Sementilli