The Vine

While I’m not a basher of social media, I love this commentary from David Murray about Twitter use taken to absurd lengths.

Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/et al. are certainly having a paradoxical effect on human interaction. We’ve never been more connected, and yet we’ve never been more disconnected. A man appears to be in medical distress, and the logical response is to tweet about it?!? It’s a Web 2.0 version of Kitty Genovese.

Social media is, of course, neither inherently good nor evil. Like any tool, it can (and will) be used in the service of all that’s beautiful and all that’s despicable about human nature.

And in the spectrum of media consumption, I do believe it’s a step in the right direction. If nothing else, it has created what Clay Shirky calls an architecture of participation. Wikipedia is a far better use of social surplus than sitting on the couch watching Desperate Housewives.

But my biggest criticism of social media is that it causes people to confuse quantity of connections with quality, and to substitute digital experiences for human ones.

In David’s post he quotes Kurt Vonnegut, who once said, “We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something.”

And David himself sums it up this way: ”Spend one day surfing the Internet and spend another roaming your neighborhood. See how many good dinner table stories you have after each. There won’t be a contest.”

Amen.