The Social Media Monster

I often tell people that social media is a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. I know, it’s a heavy statement, especially since it’s still a very young medium. But the data supporting this statement is so compelling – whether its Facebook’s 500 million users, Youtube’s 24 hours of footage uploaded to it every minute, or the 50 million tweets per day – that it’s hard to argue otherwise. The problem many of us have with explaining the shift, however, is due to the fact that its rate of change and growth is so rapid, it’s hard to feel like you’ve got it figured out. As a consequence, some might say that there are no social media experts, but there are many experimenters and some who legitimately have expertise.

If I do have expertise, it comes from being part of the last generation to know the world before and after the introduction of the internet to the mainstream. It’s not a claim to fame as much as a distinguishing factor – something which allows me to have a unique perspective on what impact the internet has had on our world. To elucidate what I mean, I’ll talk about my then and now relationship with email, text and social media.

When I got my first email account, pdilly72@hotmail.com, I used to print out each one of my emails. It seems ridiculous now but at the time, email felt important and just simply wonderful. All of a sudden, I could keep in contact with so many people at a mind blowing speed. Email is so ubiquitous today we almost lose sight of how quickly we are able to connect with people over far distances online. When I started emailing my emails were long, like the type of plane letters you give to someone when they go on a long journey or the type you write when you’ve fallen in love and are full of extra energy and emotion. Back then, I took my time and it felt good to hear from someone. Don’t get me wrong, I still write emails, some of which are long and many that make me feel good, but 90% of my emailing is work related and as brief as I can possibly make it. I don’t write to chat, you can say. I write productive for generally productive reasons.

When I was in school, my communications professor explained that the best work emails are those that fit within one screen on a mobile device. If you have a mobile device, you know exactly what I mean. It’s a hassle to read too much on the go but perhaps more importantly, text messaging, which is our predominant function of mobile phones, has set a standard for mobile communicating. Short and sweet, even if you have to change language in the process.

I began changing language when I was 13 and the proud owner of a blue, Motorola pager. At that time, the ongoing joke was that if you weren’t old enough to have a pager for professional reasons, you were probably a drug dealer. Why else would you need to communicate on the go, after all, if not to be your friendly neighbourhood drug dealer? Given the pager’s small screen and character limits, there wasn’t much you could say unless you got into numerology, but everything changed when I dropped my pager in favour of a cell phone at 16. At this point, the act of texting messaging began on an increasingly easier journey towards simple and universal use.

Indicative of its growth and improvement as a medium, in the last 10 years I’ve gone from two texts a week to two hundred. If you think that’s a lot, an average teen sends over 80 text messages a day. While I can’t tell you exactly what teens are talking about – although I can take an educated guess or two – I can tell you that I use it for making plans and for letting someone know they’ve popped into my mind. Like a hyper-form of email, text messaging is simply about efficiency and rapidity.

Nothing though, embodies rapidity more than social media. It has become a de facto way of knowing the immediate sentiment of people’s opinions. Citing what Twitter is saying, for example, is becoming more commonplace in traditional reporting and a Google search is now returning real-time conversations about subjects. Like email and text messaging, social media is coming in increasingly brief shapes and arguably more focused on quantity rather than quality. If you put a tweet, beside a text message and an email, it’s conceivable that you might not be able to tell the difference based on the look. But where it is different, where this fundamental shift occurs, is that social media is akin to constantly sending out a mass email. Its goal isn’t necessarily to be productive about work or making plans, its goal is to share with as many people as possible so that you can ostensibly manage and make as many relationships as possible. Although it can be private like email and text, it is predominantly public and unlike email and text, it does not necessitate a reply. The great trade of social media is that you get to say more to more people, but you have no guarantees anyone is listening.

Perceived this way, social media does more than epitomize the notion that we are becomingly increasingly narcissistic – it is the fuel for this movement. And like fuel itself, one could justifiably suggest that we have an unhealthy addiction to social media and as a consequence, ourselves. But just like I believe in people, I believe in social media. Granted, its impact and uncertain path can make you fear the social media monster but but we can also be equally fascinated and enamored by its potential.