The brilliant advantage and weakness of social media
You can say whatever you want, whenever you want and you never have to worry about looking your reader in the eye, pressing their flesh, and hearing their voice as they tell you what THEY thought about it. This aspect of social media appeals to the timid parts of ourselves.
This is, of course, social media’s greatest downfall (actually, it’s more of a downfall of the Internet or Web) – the fact that it allows careless, reckless and damaging anonymity plus this whole thing that Jason Calacanis has referred to as Internet Asperger’s Syndrome – the reduction of everyone to bits and bytes that we may choose to treat as video game characters and cardboard cut-outs rather than human beings.
I think it’s this whole continuum between total exposure and complete anonymity that makes the Internet, the Web, and social media as interesting as it is.
What do you think?
Victor Panlilio:
Mark – I've posted to the Net using my real name ever since I started on Usenet — in 1989, if I recall correctly, although Google's archive only seems to go back to 1992. I'm willing to be held accountable for what I post online, just as I'm willing to be held accountable for what I say to someone face to face.
7 February 2009, 9:23 pmMark Dykeman:
Which only makes sense.
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3 April 2009, 9:02 am