Recent piece in the New York Times asserts that social media have created a media environment that "is exhausting and rarely illuminating." @fmanjoo asserts that "The Internet wasn’t supposed to be this ugly. In its earliest days its pioneers harbored grand ideas about the web’s expanding our democratic discourse."
I've been online a long time. My physicist-father had us playing online games in the 1970s. And I wrote a dissertation in 1997 that examined health-related content on the internet. I've heard all about how "information wants to be free." And I've read many of the pioneers of the digital frontier who hoped that free and open communication tools would improve and expand democracy.
But I'm fairly new to #socialmedia. I was a FaceBook latecomer and I lurk more than post. I've been LinkedIn for several years, but haven't actively cultivated professional contacts. I've recently forced myself into blogging and tweeting because I'm going to teach a social media class.
One more extended quote, and then a question: "But there’s also a way in which social networks seem to be feeding a cycle of action and reaction. In just about every news event, the Internet’s reaction to the situation becomes a follow-on part of the story, so that much of the media establishment becomes trapped in escalating, infinite loops of 140-character, knee-jerk insta-reaction."
So is social media really to blame? Is it the short format? Is it the fact that anyone can publish? Is it the fact that anyone can respond? Is it the fact that everyone is trying to collect followers and build an online social presence? Is it that we all choose who we want to follow and therefore only expose ourselves to part of the story? Does social media really make us unsociable? Or is there something else going on?
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