How Technology Makes Social Media Possible

Posted by admin in Social Technology      No comments

Dec
22

What exactly do they mean when they talk about “social networking”, or “social media”.  Well, they’re not really the same thing, and the terms don’t just mean FaceBook either.  Although, FaceBook could certainly be considered a social network, and it does create a fair amount of social media.  What’s at the heart of both of these terms, is people.  It’s people coming together to either interact or create.  Quite often, it can be difficult to distinguish between interacting or creating, since one often begets the other.

The process of social interacting by having chats, leaving messages, and sharing links on FaceBook for instance is actually creating a huge logged resource for others to reference.  The fact that we record and log all our collective interactions and experiences creates a record of our history in an intimate detail never before seen in the history of mankind.  It’s weird, and a little creepy.  Is it still staking, if anthropologists are checking out my profile pictures thousands of years after I’m dead?  Now when we look back into thousands of years into the past, it takes highly trained experts to figure out what people ate and believed in.  All this often based on digging and sifting through ancient ruins and disasters.  10, 100, or 1000 years from now, they’ll just have to check our archived Facebook statuses.  With all this fancy technology, were basically putting anthropologists out of business.  Not to mention, historians and a whole other host of professions.  Keep that in mind kids when your looking for a college major.

The trick then will be the same as it is now.  Basically, how to sift through the sheer volume of crappy data, and find the stuff that’s really important.  I guess, that’s a whole new job in and of itself.