The Impact of Social Networking in Life

The Impact of Social Networking in Life

The article “I’m So Totally, Digitally, Close To You (Brave New World of Digital Intimacy)” (2002) is written by Clive Thompson, who is also a blogger and columnist. The author aims to explain the users’ attraction of Facebook, Twitter and other forms of “incessant online contact” through his text. Since social networking has become a nearly ubiquitous aspect of human contemporary life, Thomson has effectively illustrated the invasion of the social media into human daily lives, how people are commanded by it. He later goes on to explore the benefits of social networking sites and a few challenges of the usage assumptions. Facebook is great because it is a way for people to keep in contact with their friends, see what others are up to, and show people all the new updates, without having to constantly call them every day. Additionally, people lose phones, change numbers, etc., so if you don’t keep in close contact you might lose touch, but with Facebook, and you always have the same profile. It is also fairly easy to find more information about someone since one has access to their page. After had my own profile on Facebook in 2008, and the new feature New Feeds was introduced, I have never really felt socially unconnected from anyone. I feel like I have been forced not to be. Moreover, Facebook maybe is the only way I know how to interact with some people. People from classes I barely know but need as a friend to keep me reminded of homework assignments; that awkward first in-person meeting is completely rooted out when I can just post on their wall, or better yet send them a private message.

I have to admit that Facebook has saved my education quite a few times. Even though Facebook may have brought us many benefits and the convenience for establishing or maintaining connections with others, we may have leave out the scary true behind the usage of these social networking sites. Mark Zuckerberg may have helped my college career not only be much more exciting, but also much less boring. However, I became much more aware of the impact of Facebook upon my daily interactions after reading Clive Thompson’s article “I’m so Totally, Digitally, Close to You”. This article made me realize how odd it seems that I know everything about all of my friends through my “News Feed” without directly interacting with them. This troubled me, as I realized that this takes away the event of becoming reacquainted with my friends when I haven’t seen them for an extended amount of time. Although I enjoy perusing through online updates regarding what my friends are up to, I am concerned that human communication is becoming too focused upon instant information.

I am reminded of the negative effect this has upon human interactions each time I am having lunch with a friend who constantly checks Facebook and Twitter updates on a cell phone. These updates eventually evolve from an interruption into the dictating topic of conversation. Therefore, I worry that by obsessing over online social news updates, we are failing to interact with the people directly in front of us, who, in most cases, are much more pertinent to our current lives than our digital friends, whom we watch from afar. In the article, Thompson also tried to address this issue about the implications of the integration of the News Feed into Facebook for his readers. Mark Zuckerberg, realized that his social network system “had one major problem: it required a lot of active surfing on the part of its users. … But unless [users] visited each of their friends’ pages every day, it might be days or weeks before [they can] notice the news and recent updates, or [they] might miss it entirely” (p.543). With this issue being brought to the surface, Zuckerberg “decided to modernize. He developed something called News Feed, a built-in service that would actively broadcast changes in a user’s page to every one of his or her friends” (p.544). … Instead of users browsing around the web to see what is New, “they would just log into Facebook and News Feed would appear: a single page that… delivered a long list up-to-the-minute gossip about their friends, around the clock, all in one place. ‘A stream of everything that’s going on in their lives,’ as Zuckerberg put it” (p.544).

However, this new Facebook’s feature can be backfired because Facebook invades users’ privacy. Many users felt like their privacy was completely infiltrated, just about everything users updated or changed was instantly blasted out to hundreds of friends. News Feed has kept all the users’ information “loud”, and allowed people to see pictures and posts, which could give out information that users might not want their friends to know. Users claim that News Feed features leave the door open for people to ‘creep’. “Facebook has always tried to push the envelope” (p.545) and “Everyone is freaking out” (p.544). Using people’s first reaction to the Facebook’s “News Feed” feature, Thompson later explains the privacy problem that this new feature may have caused. Thompson tries to inform the readers both side of the benefits and disadvantages using Facebook. The author creates a great connection with the readers by doing so, makes the readers feel that he’s on the same with them, that he understands the whole circumstances. Users were skeptical at first according to Thompson and that’s due to “…at a time [News Feed] means stretching people and getting them to be comfortable with things they aren’t yet comfortable with. A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of” (p.545).

Thompson effectively illustrates that technology has not only allowed people to stay in contact that would not have necessary kept contact on a face-to-face basis, but also helped them to understand one other through a simple communication made through the Internet. He later claims that many Facebook users later find themselves intrigued and addicted to this sort of omnipresent knowledge that Facebook presents because they like the fact that they can actually learn things about their Facebook friends faster and/or things that they wouldn’t have otherwise discovered through random surfing around the site. “It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind and I love it”, an actual Facebook users, Haley said (p.546). Thompson goes on to talk about how stupid Twitter seemed to him when he first heard of it: For many people — particularly anyone over the age of 30 — the idea of describing your blow-by-blow activities in such detail is absurd. Why would you subject your friends to your daily minutiae? And conversely, how much of their trivia can you absorb? The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme — the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world. (p.545)

Using his own opinion of the experience about these social tools, Thompson once again develops a strong connection with his audiences regarding how users would usually deal with these networks the first time they know them. As he said, they think it is quite stupid and useless at first to get updates related to what their friends are doing. Yet, after they use create an account and plunge inside the network, it becomes a habit to check what their friends are doing, did, or are going to do. Thompson uses the discussion he had with Shannon Seery, a thirty-two-year-old recruiting consultant, who also has a huge Twitter following, to drawn his point of how Twitter is essential in some people life and career. The author applies his own thoughts and experiences to support his claims. When Thompson spoke with Seery, he asked her about what it’s like for her to have so many people to keep up with, and the idea of being too busy to have much of a social life but being able to connect via Twitter and Facebook with the world: I asked Seery how she finds the time to follow so many people online.

The math seemed daunting. After all, if her 1,000 online contacts each post just a couple of notes each a day, that’s several thousand little social pings to sift through daily. What would it be like to get thousands of e-mail messages a day? But Seery made a point I heard from many others: awareness tools aren’t as cognitively demanding as an e-mail message. E-mail is something you have to stop to open and assess. It’s personal; someone is asking for 100 percent of your attention. In contrast, ambient updates are all visible on one single page in a big row, and they’re not really directed at you. This makes them skimmable, like newspaper headlines; maybe you’ll read them all, maybe you’ll skip some. Seery estimated that she needs to spend only a small part of each hour actively reading her Twitter stream. (p.548) Facebook, Twitter, and the like have created a social understanding amongst us. Never before have people been so aware of what is going on around them. What social scientists have called this sort of incessant online contact is the “ambient awareness.” “It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does–body language, sighs, stray comments–out of the corner of your eye” (p.545). Social media can help a lot of people become and stay aware of big ideas and issues going on in the world today. Also, it is necessary that people explore how they can use these tools as teaching aids and guiders. Technology can be good and technology can be bad. It can give people lots of convenience for their social life, but also can take away their privacy and interpersonal skills.

Everyone has an online experience with other people today. Facebook or Twitter, there is no big difference when it comes to ‘linking people digitally’. The fact is that people’s ability to stay with no social contact is weak, which leads everyone to try new ways of getting in contact with people. As the social networks are getting closer to human life, that’s how people are getting closer to each other. We can look at the number of people we have added as friends to notice how much we love being inside a social bubble that can in fact either explode or collapse. The text raises many questions about the social mechanisms that lead us to make this links with people that sometimes we do not even know, but we have associated them as friends. Here comes another question, which is what the meaning of a friend is. Technology made its own definition. As what Thompson defines, a friend in Facebook is someone we can talk to; see his/her photos, videos, communicate and perhaps other friends. The other face of the social networking is also the up-to-date information that people gather about others while using these networks. As said in the text, users claim that they would like to know what somebody does during the day as if they were with him/her. Again, technology made it even easier, especially with the smartphones.

One can now receive a sound notification whenever a friend has added a new feed or publication. Thompson has the readers thinking whether or not people are really closer to their ‘friends’ by using these social networking tools, or they are maybe just virtually closer, but not physically as said in the title of the text. Moreover, social network perhaps is the only way some people know how to interact with others. Most people on Facebook now are getting used to contacting each other digitally, and not in person. They are losing their interpersonal communication skills, and this will hurt them in establishing relationships when they are older. It is important to understand that may be the fundamental reason social network grew into what it is today and how it affects people lives. Users increased involvement in online interaction is significantly impacting the way they think and behave socially in all situations.