Social Media – The Connected or disconnected society? By Lao Fo
A familiar scene in modern culture is a group of teenagers or adults sat around in their social group in a public place such as a café or a pub and not one of them are talking to one another. Each person is lost in their virtual world, linking their ideas, their emotions, their thoughts and dreams on a social media of one form or another that is accessible for the world to see. There is a lust to expand our friend networks and our connectivity to the world, but have we lost the art of communication through our expansion to be more connected?
Social Media has quickly established itself as the necessity of modern society. There are over 1.2 billion Facebook users and 24 million people from the UK sign into Facebook every day. The size and popularity of Facebook is unprecedented and unlike anything we have seen before. People have flocked to sign up and people update status, post photos interact on Facebook on a Daily (or more) basis. Smartphones have allowed us to be constantly in touch with the latest Facebook’s going on. We are on the pulse of society at a fingertip.
However, it is not all a perfect ideological connectivity revolution, there have been numerous complaints about Facebook and it’s various user policies that invade people’s privacy. Also, Edward Snowden’s whistle blower on sites like Facebook and Google, that they have been allowing Government agencies such as NSA to access users personal information and track their data. Facebook has been found out not to protect people’s privacy, but this has done little to stop Facebook’s expanse and it’s popularity.
Despite the dangers of Social Media, why are we as a society addicted to it? One answer, has found through studies into users of Facebook and other social media, that there is release of dopamine amongst it’s users, which is a feel good hormone that is also released during sex. Other studies have shown addiction to Facebook is more severe than Alcohol and Tobacco addiction. This study also found people craving Facebook after withdrawal periods and those craving being more intensive with the longer withdrawal. With sex and sleep the top two human urges, Facebook has quickly become the third its users.
One of the things that Social Media allows is to put our thoughts and our emotions to be put out there to an audience. It is an outlet to express yourself creatively. It is also a support network of friends, a way for people to keep in touch that are unable to see one another. It creates a respect of one another forms of expressions. The ability to connect to people is endless, helping people to build up networks and maintain relationships. Thus, when social media is used in such a way how can it be detrimental?
As a form of expression it allows people to be listened to, perhaps those who struggle to find a voice in normal social situations and can find a voice through social media. So how many people are actually listening? There is a theory by Robin Dunbar, that not that many people are. Coining the term “Dunbar’s number” he theorised that we can only maintain roughly about 150 relationships depending on the brain’s social capacity. Of those relationships only about a dozen, keep track of your status updates and so forth and only a few relationships can be classed as “dependable” relationships. The relationships that you can rely on people for emotional or financial support. So in terms of expanding our social network, it can be argued that we are no richer in the relationships that we establish. The truth is that social media as a way of reaching out to connect to people is no more successful than other methods of communication. The Facebook limit is for 5000 friends. Most users only use a fraction of that amount.
Facebook is also a perfect timewaster, students who used iPads to study, 99% were said to be distracted by social media. It is no surprise when Facebook or Twitter notifications are popping up with the latest news of who has replied or liked your latest update.
Time will only tell for society of whether social media is a good thing or a bad thing. It could help ourselves be more connected and develop as a society, or whether people will become more disconnected and isolated from one another. Maybe the right platform in terms of social media has not come along yet. In the mid 2000’s, people sang the praises of Myspace as the social media platform to use and it dominated the market share. It helped launch the careers of the Arctic Monkeys, and but now only has a fraction of tit’s users that it use to have. Maybe Facebook and Twitter will make way for a more meaningful form of connecting people. There are forms of interaction over the internet that are already developing, which Robin Dunbar himself discussed, that are more effective at establishing and maintaining relationships like Skype and Facetime. These allow personal responses and allow people to feed off visual cues, cues that can be lost on mediums like Facebook and Twitter.
The revolution of social media is still relatively new, there are many questions and answers to be asked and sought as we come to grips with it’s implications. Such as will we lose the art of conversation with our peers, to only communicate most of the time through status updates? Or will we develop further our skills in the use of social media to develop ourselves as a race and society? Or will we blur the boundary or the real world and the virtual world until we can no longer tell which is which? Or is that already our reality now?
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