What Twitter does: castrates brains down to “no more than 140 characters”. Give it 3–4 years and the sentences in school essays will be the same
What Facebook does: devalues the meaning of the words friend and friendship
A very popular opinion, and an offensive one.
Social networks (we used to say “the internet”) and modern technology in general really are changing the ways people communicate, and a lot.
The trouble is that, in my humble opinion, they enrich this communication.
Let’s think together about how technology has developed over the last few centuries. Communication, communication and once more communication.
Telegraph, telephone, radio, television → internet, blogs, social networks, Skype and so on.
Sorry for the technological jumble: the point isn’t the order they appeared in or exact definitions.
There are many more ways to communicate now. Now we have friends in our LiveJournal feed, followers on Twitter, friends on Facebook and VKontakte, and a lot more.
By the way, andrewdaf gave a telling answer on Formspring to what was apparently a robo-question, “If you could only read one magazine for the rest of your life, which would it be?”:
oh, I’d read my friends feed if I could
Just think: we’ve started talking to our classmates! Whom we’d otherwise barely remember…
We can see the person we’re talking to on the phone! Could you have imagined that 15 years ago?
Blogs are a separate topic. The Davids are finally armed against the Goliaths. Read Reynolds.
Twitter helps strip ideas of their husk. Tweets don’t replace blog posts. They’re just one more way of passing on information. Twitter is a short thought, a quick way to pass on a link, a mood or an emotion. It isn’t a replacement for blogs. It’s an addition.
Facebook and VKontakte help people meet and talk. They let people exchange a few words with lots of old and new acquaintances without leaving home or work.
People often say there’s less face-to-face communication. I think it’s less only in relative terms. That is, there’s more communication and it’s more varied, and face-to-face is just one part of it. Cafés and clubs don’t seem to have gone bust…
Friendship. What is friendship the old way? A fictitious reliability, cemented by the hours of lessons sat through together? We used to be friends with the people we happened to grow up with, then study with, then, much less often but still, work with.
Now we’re friends with people who share our interests and hobbies. Feel the difference? An element of conscious choice. That’s what matters.
There’s a joke, I read it on Twitter, I think:
Facebook is the people you went to school with, and Twitter is the people you wish you’d gone to school with.
Old-style friendship is largely a geographical notion. New-style friendship… How real it is remains to be argued.
Social networks arm people. They enrich their lives with new forms of communication. With new knowledge. They widen the circle of acquaintances → which means more information. People find jobs and their calling more easily. People share photos, thoughts, ideas. People preserve memory.
People organize, protest, invent and dream.
Yes, all of this existed before! But now it’s easier, faster, cheaper, more pleasant and safer to do. And we’re doing it!
P.S. If you’re interested, read more about the strength of weak ties in Gladwell. In The Tipping Point, for example, the chapter “The Law of the Few”, part 4.
P.P.S. My fairly recent post on the topic: “Young people used to be completely different!”