Judgment – I am wondering what all your …
Judgment – I am wondering what all your thoughts are regarding judging the way people use social media. Top trends on Twitter this week:
* New Moon.
* Modern Warfare
* #theresway2manys.
* #youmightbealiberal
* #youknowyouruglyif
By making communication easy, are we hurting its value? I think by making communication easy we are expanding the human connection, maybe even getting closer. But I wonder about what we share, and what that means…
Evan 12:15 pm on November 19, 2009 Permalink |
And that’s Modern Warfare the video game, not discussion around warfare in the modern age, of course.
thePuck 7:57 am on November 28, 2009 Permalink |
I would argue that by opening the methods of communication and making it easier, what we are doing is adding bandwidth to social knowledge. In the past knowledge was held by a privileged few, then with the advent of the printing press that few became much larger. In the same way, knowledge is now in the hands of more and more people. Since there is more bandwidth to use to pass around information, the premium on that bandwidth is much lower, hence the frivolousness of those topics.
Consider: paper was once at such a commodity that books were reused by scraping the ink off the parchment. Only the most necessary messages and information was written down, because the bandwidth for social knowledge (abstractions encoded so people can communicate over time and distance) was at such a premium.
More bandwidth is good. Who is to say what set of information someone else will find useful?
Evan 6:19 pm on December 22, 2009 Permalink |
Good insight – and I agree that more bandwidth is better, and easy communication has reaped many benefits.
But it was not long after the printing press that we saw Yellow Journalism arrive…
Easy media is also more easy to manipulate.
I wonder, what is on the otherside of the pendulum swing? to counteract easy information, there must exist or arise, an even more exclusive source of information that is more valued simply due to it’s scarcity.