Overheard at the neighbourhood grocery store (keeping in mind that the said store is a leftover crumb of a building, in a village that is the equivalent of Morrissey’s ‘coastal town, that they forgot to close down’
Social media is about sociology and psychology more than technology- Brian Solis, marketing executive
70-year-old customer: “Hurry up with that ‘arkotta’. I need to go water my plants.”
Grocer: “Why do you still bother with that Farmville game? Try Diamond Dash – fiha pjaċir (it’s fun).”
Grocer’s husband: “Everyone’s on b** phrasebook (sic).”
The extent to which we have all embraced social media is that your mother – maybe even your grandma – has a Facebook account. And your dad spends most of his free time indulging his dark side on Mafia Wars.
True, you may dismiss social media as glorified doodling – just another form of collaborative consumption.
Yet social media is more than that. It is also collaborative production. Take language, that mirror-mirror-on-the-wall which perfectly reflects human creativity.
No author, historical event or generational shift has added as many new words to our language and in such a short span of time as social media – from ‘crowd-sourced’ to ‘geotagged’ and ‘Twitter-mining’, our vocabulary is constantly being enriched by words that describe our social media activity.
Social media floats our stupidity to the surface – troublemakers are frequently tracked down by law enforcement because they cannot resist discussing their latest crimes on social media platforms.
Yet, social media is also an intelligent tool to stage a revolution – the Arab Spring would still have taken place without Facebook and Twitter, but not as fast as it did.
Social media is the modern day grapevine, yet it is also narcissistic – the look-at-me of our generation. It brings us closer to others, yet makes us feel alone. It is an impersonal medium, yet sometimes too personal; it is polite yet an unmoderated For A Few Dollars More situation.
Social media is free, but it isn’t – in 2011, $2 billion were spent on virtual goods. And that’s just in the US. It is for work and for play – 50 per cent of Facebook logins are to play games.
It limits our imagination, making us think that Facebook’s Timeline feature is an actual history of the world, and the screen the stage where we strut and fret our hour upon the stage. But it is also what fuels our imagination and expands economies.
Social media is everything and nothing. And it perfectly reflects who we are – utterly, helplessly, amazingly human.
techeditor@timesofmalta.com