The darker side

Starting with the recent uprising in Tunisia through to the apparent full-blast revolution in the streets of Egypt, social media is being credited with playing a central role. On the social front it is however receiving some sharp criticism and on the commercial front there is talk of a bubble that may burst.

The dramatic socio-political developments presently taking place in the Arab world forcefully illustrate to what extent the social media phenomenon of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, Myspace and the like can unite societies, get them to frantically communicate with one-another and create a unity of purpose.

They also illustrate how social media  can be used to mobilise communities against regimes, which have lost their monopoly on communication infrastructures.

There is, however also another, less cheery side to this phenomenon. The way in which people frantically communicate online via Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging can be described as a form of modern madness, according to a leading American sociologist.

Many parents with teenage children, who have effectively disappeared from household conversations while their eyes are glued to the tiny screens of their cellphones with their thumbs up and down on the miniature keyboards, would fully agree with Sherry Turkle’s assessment that it’s  “a behaviour that has become typical and (that) may still express the problems that once caused us to see it as pathological”

Professor Turkle wrote a book under the title Alone Together which is at the forefront of a renewed re-evaluation of the social impacts of the social media. Leading to anti-social behaviour and isolation from the immediate physical social environment, the term social media is becoming a misnomer for many.

Turkle’s thesis is that technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human. Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world.

Professor William Kist of the Kent Sate University in Ohio talks of a huge backlash against the social media. The different kinds of communication that people are using have become something that scares people, he says.

Some academics suggest that the way people are using the internet is altering the way they think and makes them less capable of digesting large complex amounts of information, such as books and magazines

On the commercial front

In an article last week Richard Mullins, director of digital marketing consulting firm Acceleration, posed the question: “Social media – is the bubble going to burst?”

“Over the past few years, social media has ballooned from a small, emerging market into a major force in the online marketing and advertising space. However, those who lived through the dotcom boom-and-bust cycle can’t help asking whether we are about to see another bubble burst.

“The hype about social media has quickly become inflated, more brands are throwing resources into interacting with customers on social media, and there is still no real clarity about how most social networking sites are going to monetise the massive user base they have built, outside of advertising.

“At what point, ask sceptics, will investors become unwilling to pour their money into these websites? When will brands start to become disillusioned with their returns from advertising on social networks and using them as platforms to interact with their customers?

“At what point will users start leaving social networks in their droves, either out of boredom or because of concerns about how their confidential data is handled by websites such as Facebook? The fact that an increasing number of people are asking those questions certainly seems to indicate that the social media market will soon go through a period of readjustment.

“However, I don’t believe that we’ll see the bubble burst as dramatically as it did in the early 2000s when the dotcom market imploded. Instead, we’ll  see businesses and consumers alike gradually integrate social media into their everyday lives until it simply becomes one of the many channels they use for everyday communication. I’d describe that as a market normalising rather than a bubble bursting,” Mullins writes.