How Twitter and Facebook are Antisocial

Sir David Wilkie, R.A. Study for 'Reading the News', c. 1821

Ok, I admit I had high hopes for the social media. I have high hopes for everything, a perfect self inflicted set up.

But really it takes time to develop friendships. Most genuine friendships are with people from the same school, sports team, platoon or your work colleagues. Translation – a friendship develops after you spend hours, perhaps years with a person; it also involves working together on a project, having a common goal. The original Facebook was really a good fit for classmates. If you already nurtured a friendship than it makes sense to send a 140 character message as a subtitle to the familiar thread in your relationship, the original SMS idea behind Twitter. Indeed I would like to see a photo from a friend on vacation. But I don’t really care seeing some sunny side up Twitpic from a dude in Australia. Just when I am falling asleep, he is having tomorrow’s breakfast… Twitter and Facebook are the new “mixer dance”, they say. So I though and asked for a follow up meetings with people friended on the networks, to “really to get to know each other”. That’s the whole point I thought, how naïve of me.

Now here comes the nuevo marketing crowd and it’s only natural when a medium appears people are trying to apply old ideas to the new toy on the block. A marketer sees a rapidly scalable distribution network with zero entry cost. In other words, it’s like a TV broadcast, only free. Your send out a signal and let people passively consume it, perhaps even retweet (rebroadcast) the message on your behalf, again for free. Well, nothing “social” about that. There are some legitimate OCD people on Twitter at the rate of one tweet every 5 minutes; the ones that are selling at least got an excuse. And like with any of these internet mushrooms there is a cult element, in other words, after one invests significant time and effort, the investment itself gives value to the service, not matter the rationale or the results.

And when the reach is free and scalable, there is a multiplier profit at the point of a spigot. And everyone figures out that there are no barriers of entry and it quickly turns into a massive spam machine. People tune out and the worst thing analogues to the good old email, is that amongst the constant bombardment of messages people start to tune out even the few real friends they have on the networks. And then it’s no longer about the new connections but often about poisoning the well of your real, precious friendships.

Image licensed courtesy of Picture Library of the Royal Academy of Arts.