I know I’ve mentioned this before so pardon me for repeating myself. I must comment on the ridiculousness of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and the like. While all of these tools can present useful and helpful ways for groups of people to stay connected, I find that the power these sites offer is greatly overqualified for the people using them. It’s like using a bazooka to unlock a locked door. Sure, it’ll open the door, but the power of the tool being used far outweighs the need.
Sites like Twitter have amazing potential to be used as real-time connections to people and devices. It allows simple, short, and precise messages to be broadcast to groups of people or even a single recipient. The problem though is that while Twitter is a monumentally powerful tool, the people’s hands this tool is used in most frequently use it to broadcast nothing more interesting than the frequency of their bowel movements. I guess the biggest flaw with social networking sites isn’t the technology, but the people who are using said technology.
People feel the need to say anything, anytime, to anyone, regardless of importance, relevance, or even accuracy. They just type in anything. I don’t expect everyone to live an exciting life full of intrigue and drama, but be mindful of who you are sending these messages out to; the entire world.
“Well, my friends care!”
That is a statement I hear quite often when I bring up my complaints about social networking sites. Well, let’s focus on this for a moment. Let’s pretend for a moment that this is true and your friends really do have empty enough lives to hang on your every word in the hopes of living vicariously through you. What you don’t understand is, in respect to Twitter, if you are posting to the global timeline, more than just your friends are seeing this message. Effectively what you are doing is causing internet pollution with your senseless drivel to ~25 people. Not only is that horribly inefficient, it’s a misuse of the technology. A simple mass email to those ~25 people would be the appropriate action. You wouldn’t put up a billboard on a busy highway to let your friends know you got a new puppy, would you? Sure, you could if you so desired, but like above it would be a gross waste of resources and far too inefficient.
People should just start using the technology for what it is designed to do. Email, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, are all viable forms of technology each with their own use. Use them for what they were designed to do and stop polluting the Internet as if it was your own personal diary. Unless your fame rises to international status, every post you make will probably only be seen by <1% of your intended targets.
Facebook, a site designed around the notion of bringing people who might have lost contact with each other back into each others’ lives now has more to do with fire-and-forget posts than anything else; Post and ignore. Occasionally you might see a conversation going on a post someone made, but unless you are taking the time to praise someone’s pictures of their kids or “liking” their post, nothing much will come from it. Facebook, in a sense, is a massive waste of time with little to no output.
Social Networking means being social and networking with people. If neither of these things are a product of a site, it fails to meet any level of usefulness if that is what the site if trying to achieve. Oddly enough, one-on-one messaging is still far more effective and efficient than mass-messaging in the hopes your intended audience actually sees it.
