Does Social Media Make You Less Social?
February 9, 2008 · Print This Article
Just as I was thinking that this Social Media phenomena was actually making me more social, along came this post by Bill Cammack over on FastCompany’s new website, which I am liking a lot .. but a post is forthcoming on that soon.
Bill was interviewed by Jonny Goldstein on his Par-tay and his response to Jonny’s question as to whether or not he thought social media made people more social was it does not. Bill said :
My point was that I became less social instead of more social because of the fact that my friends are always at my fingertips. For the sake of this post, I’m defining “social” as actually going somewhere to hang out with friends of mine, IRL.
Jonny actually thinks that it can lead to more actual social interaction and I agree with him. Seeing as I met Jonny through a mutual twitter friend and have since started watching his show regularly and seen him in actual person on several occasions it only leads to reason. Had I not been using these new social media tools, I would have never had the pleasure of not only meeting him, but a whole slew of other great people in the local DC area here.
Bill makes some interesting points
There’s no reason for me to physically go ANYWHERE unless physically interacting with that person is the reason I’m going. You can’t go snowboarding together unless you actually go snowboarding. Other than that, the current state of communications enables you to be AS in-touch with someone as you want to be …
I think that more often, social media allows us to FEIGN getting together, which is actually *less* social than more so.
but i tend to disagree with most of them, especially that last one there. I think that once you find your niche in these social tools, like Twitter, it leads to some really interesting real life social interactions. The fact that I have some background on the people I have found really makes the real life meeting that much easier and more comfortable. Meeting people “cold” is not easy, but when you have that online rapport already established it helps the transition. Then once you have a base of these “online”/”offline” friends the tentacles spread out from there and you meet the friend of one of your friends and so on. Here is an irony for you, now when I meet these peripheral friends, if you will, I go online later and start following them, and the cycle starts again.
In my opinion, my foray into social media has led to some great contacts, good friends, and thet start of a burgeoning tech culture here in the DC area.
So what do you all think, does social media make you more social ?
Hey Jimmy. Thanks for the re-blog.
I agree with all of the points that you made. I actually made some similar points in my post yesterday morning, entitled “Sharing Breakfast”.
Joshua Porter also extended this conversation on his blog [link]. One reader in particular, William “Papa” Meloney mentioned that he lived in rural Kentucky, which prompted me to further explain the background to my statement.
I live in New York City, so that means I can’t walk out the door without seeing someone. We’re literally surrounded by millions of people every single day. You don’t have to go five minutes without talking to someone IRL if you don’t want to.
If we choose to define “social” as actually spending time with people in their location, I’m WAY less social now than I was before. With all the tools available to us today, including Yahoo Live, which just started about three days ago, there’s no reason for me to get on a plane, fly to Hawaii and sit down for lunch with Roxanne Darling.
Instead, I’m going to fire up any one of a number of social services and contact her.
Even thinking locally, I’m less inclined to, say, go hang out in the park than to hold 5 simultaneous iChat conversations with diversely different people. This is partially because of what you mention: “once you find your niche in these social tools, like Twitter, it leads to some really interesting real life social interactions”.
Now that it’s possible for me to understand more about where people are coming from or what they think or what we might chat about when we get together, I’m way less inclined to interact with random people than I am to seek out the people that I have determined are “worth my while” by reading their blogs and watching their videos. Therefore, I have become *more* social with a *smaller* group of individuals. My interactions are of higher quality in this configuration, for sure.
Another ‘problem’ (of my own creation) is that the more people you follow on services like twitter, pownce, seesmic and various groups and forums, the more interesting information you are made aware of. The more information, the more tangents, open tabs and windows.
You can spend an entire day chasing down leads to articles and videos that *YOU* find interesting, because you’ve selected people to follow that have a proven track record of being involved in or starting conversations or posting links that you find worthwhile. In one way, this could be considered social, because you are building your rapport to the person whose links you’re following, but I think it’s actually antisocial because unless you’re leaving comments for the people whose links you’re following, they don’t know that you’re even aware that they exist.
So, getting back to the point… If I lived in rural Kentucky, I’d say that social media was an INCREDIBLY social tool, because compared to the number of people available to me on a regular basis, there are many many more for me to meet online. Living in NYC, where you can make 10 new friends every single day if you feel like it, the effect of social media for me has been to decrease my socialization, except for a relatively low number of people whom I’ve determined (through social media) are going to be fun, interesting and entertaining to hang out with.
Cheers!
~Bill