Now that I have a laptop again, I have decided to participate in a 30 day writing challenge. Every day I get a new topic to write about. I think this will be good for me and will force me to write, think, and maybe even discover new things about myself.
Today's challenge is 5 Things Wrong with Social Media.
1. It's too easy to spread misinformation. With our attention spans getting shorter and our demand for learning things instantly getting stronger, I feel that social media fails from time to time with fact checking. How many people have been declared dead on Twitter? How many times does a tragedy happen and people are reporting whatever they think they saw, or retweeting information without checking facts? I find that people are quick to blame the news channels when they get something wrong, but have no problem retweeting that the world is coming to an end, when really it was just an acorn falling on their head. Plus anyone can write anything. Where are the "trusted" journalists? Anyone with a cell phone can become an "on the street" reporter.
2. It's making conversations/experiences less personal. I remember standing in line for hours to see "Star Wars" in 1977. The popularity of the movie was spread by word of mouth, or reading reviews in the newspaper. There was no "pre-release" of the trailer unless you had seen a different movie in the theatre a month or two before. And when the movie was over, you couldn't log onto Facebook and tell all your friends. You had to go to school and talk to people about it. You could have conversations in the car with your parents on the way home instead of being buried in your cell phone. Earlier this year I had surgery and my throat swelled from the breathing tube so I couldn't speak. My boyfriend and I sat next to each other on the couch and texted each other. We were in the same room, but we were looking at screens instead of each other. I hear that Chili's now has a little screen at it's tables so you don't have to talk to anyone...not to order, not to pay. That's all well and good if you're in a hurry, but where's the interaction? I went back to Chicago a few weeks ago and walked into a bar I've been going to since I was of legal age to drink (and maybe even before). The waitress who I hadn't seen in 3 years remembered me and told me about a breast cancer event they were holding the next day. I told her to give me her "information" so I could keep in touch. She gave me a phone number. She doesn't do Facebook, she doesn't do email...she likes person to person interaction and conversation and these days that's rare. You've heard the stories of actors stopping in a play because someone's phone went off or they were taping the event. Don't you go to a play to experience it? How can you do that when you're staring at it through a screen? I want to see Benedict Cumberbatch play Hamlet. I want to look at his reactions, I want to see the sweat on his brow...I can't do that while trying to Periscope the experience.
3. It may be distributing too much information. I'm just as curious as the next person and yes, I like to see how my friends are doing, and what's going on with a sports team, or even the headlines of the day...but do I need minute by minute updates of Lindsey Lohan's whereabouts? Do I need to know what Kardashian is doing what? Do I need to see bodies on the ground after a plane crash? How many times do I have to watch that college football player or basketball player fall down awkwardly on his leg and end his career? (I remember watching Joe Theismann break his leg on Monday Night Football--I saw it once and that's more times than I needed to see it.) Also, now that I live on the West Coast, those people that watch a program on the East Coast know what happened before I do and they tend to distribute that information without thought for others. I found out what happened on "The Walking Dead" last week just because I was scrolling through Facebook before I watched the episode. I found out results of the Olympics before they were televised. That's taking the fun and the discovery out of things. Why should I pay attention if I already know the outcome?
4. It's giving people a false sense of power. The good and the bad about social media is that you can be anonymous. How many people have tweeted something to someone that they would NEVER say to their face? I remember writing a letter to Jimmy Carter back when he was President and mentioning in the letter that some of my classmates didn't like him. Yet he still sent me a picture of the White House (or someone on his staff did). I'm sure he got lots of letters, some positive and some negative, but I'm sure he didn't get MILLIONS of letters the minute after he gave a speech. (And I signed my name to my letter---not many would do that these days.) Many people have said it before, but I do wonder how many people would say what they tweet to someone's face. The "Mean Tweets" segment on Jimmy Kimmel is funny, but I'm sure if they had the tweeter reading them directly to the tweeted that not many people would show up. Social media makes it easier to say anything to anyone at anytime. That's not always a good thing.
5. There's too much of it. There used to be one newspaper edition a day (sometimes an evening edition if something breaking happened during the day). There was one news program, a few radio stations. Now it's all there all the time. I can hop on the internet or twitter or Facebook at any hour of the day and something is being written about something. I can turn on the TV and see news or weather 24 hours a day. Where is the break? When can I turn my mind to other things or do I have to be "connected" all 24 hours? How long do we have to talk about Justin Bieber's dick pics? Do we have to stay with the protest until the last person is standing on the street? I like finding out about bigger events when they happen, but I don't need to know everything all the time. I need some time to shut down, turn off, experience the world around me and the people in it.
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