It's that time of year again

Spring is in the air, quite literally. My car is covered in a layer of greenish, sticky pollen. Finals are once again approaching, and so I will be temporarily withdrawing from the social media world. However, I thought I'd leave you with some of my current thoughts on social media.

Last night's episode of South Park dealt with the time consuming and often annoying entity which is facebook. Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman have become obsessed with Facebook, but Stan wants no part in it.

Unfortunately his friends have already made Stan a Facebook profile and he is soon drawn into the insane world of social media, quite literally. You can watch the episode in its entirety here.

The part of this episode which struck me the hardest was the character of Kip Drordy, a sweet but awkward student who has 0 facebook friends. Kyle feels sorry for Kip and adds him as a friend. Kip is  ecstatic to have a new "friend." 

Unfortunately Kyle is eventually forced to "defriend" Kip because he is "bad friend stock" and is turning Kyle into something of an outcast himself.

I know it's ridiculous, but I actually felt sorry for Kip. I was a huge nerd in elementary and middle school. I doubt I would have 0 facebook friends, but I certainly wouldn't have had more than a handful. Middle school is an especially hard time for most kids, there is a constant LordoftheFlieseque struggle to keep from being on the bottom of the social ladder. 

Now imagine being in middle school and being on Facebook. Even if you don't really want to be on Facebook you would know that absence would be just as conspicuous as your presence. So Facebook could easily become the perfect measuring tool for the popular kids and bullies to determine just who is  "unpopular" or "nerdy." Maybe the cut off is having less than 50 friends, maybe it's 100, it doesn't matter. Furthermore, photos, events, groups, and videos allow the elites of the middle school world to quickly broadcast their inclusion and self-created importance to their social inferiors. 

Social media is an exciting AND frightening new frontier in interpersonal interaction. The membership  and influence of flasgship websites like Facebook and Twitter is growing exponentially. 

The latest estimate is that 116,010,760 Americans have a Facebook profile. Via Mashable.

That's over 1/3 of the American population, not excluding small children and the elderly. 

Everyone is getting on Facebook.

Social media is quickly becoming the primary way many people: communicate with friends and family;  network and find jobs; learn about new music, t.v. programs, music and movies; express their political and religious beliefs; and even keep up with current events. 

Isn't it time that people with foresight and knowledge [behavioral psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and ministers (and yes, even lawyers)] begin to not only observe and study social media interaction, but explain it to us? To provide their fellow citizens, their clients, their friends and fellow believers with their insight and advice? Isn't it time for our culture to consider guidelines for the ethical,healthy, and responsible use of social media?

Why? Why not just let everyone figure it out for themselves? 

We are already seeing the results of that approach, and they aren't pretty:

An angry and immature mother's MySpace hoax leads to a girl's suicide. Story.

Students expelled for drunken photos posted online.

Employees fired for online indiscretions. 

How far does it have to go before we as a society realize that we are interacting in ways that people never have before? Before we realize that our lives are now more open, and consequently more vulnerable, than they ever were before?

Social Media, the End of Living?

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it. - Morpheus

My roommate Pierce went to a Wilco concert here in Memphis last Saturday. At the concert, Wilco's lead singer asked the audience not to film. Then he added these remarks (ironically posted on youtube):

My roommate Pat got a job recently. At his job he researches social media. He reads books on social media. He tries to improve his twitter ranking.

To do this he has downloaded a program called "Tweedeck."

I downloaded Tweetdeck. Suddenly every few seconds my laptop would beep and a tiny little black and red box would tell me that one of my friends had a new status update

or tweet.

So I wonder what is the real cost of social media?

Why do I need to know what 1,000 people are doing today?

Why do I care if other people know what I am doing right now?

I've blogged about this before.

But my mind keeps coming back to it.

I can't help but wonder: what are we doing to ourselves?

This guy over at Orion had some interesting thoughts on this conundrum.

"Addiction, neurologists say, changes the physical shape of our brains. Each time... another text message, another headline, another update, my brain injects a little dopamine into a reward pathway. 'You’ve got mail!' squeals the computer and—whoosh!—here comes a shot of dopamine...WHAT IF, while you read the last few paragraphs, something in the world has changed? What if, during the past five minutes, someone, somewhere, sent you a text? Shouldn’t you go and check?"

We weren't always like this. We didn't always have to document every moment of our waking lives. People used to just live.

We used to have cameras, but cameras were difficult enough and expensive enough that we only used them on special occasions like family vacations and weddings.

Then came digital cameras, the internet, cell-phones, cell-phone cameras, and of course the real catalysts for the way we now live, or don't live, our lives: myspace, youtube, facebook, and twitter.

And at some point I actually found myself playing farmville, a game where I pretend to maintain a farm. Why? I don't fucking know. Everyone else was doing it?

The crazy thing about farmville is that my parents have a farm, and so do my grandparents. But those are real farms. Farms that grew real plants and real trees. Farms where people put in real work, real sweat, and real blood and tears.

What is social media doing to us? What has it done to me?

I'm going to be taking another break for a while- not deleting my accounts this time, but not checking them either. If you need to contact me, please e-mail me at austin.maness@memphis.edu or call me.