The way we communicate has changed drastically since the introduction of social media. Before we would meet up and usually talk for half an hour or more about anything and we'd call it a day. Now we communicate for maybe less than ten minutes and in those ten minutes we get through a lot of conversation without ever meeting face to face. The great thing about this is that we can talk with people who are far away in a matter of seconds. We get news straight from people around the world in a few moments and its really changed how we see the world.
The downside to all this communication is the lack of physical presence we have with one another. Apart from that most things we would usually share with our close friends such as a break up or a job opportunity is instantly shared with everyone we are associated with. The lack of privacy is in my opinion disturbing because now whoever you know whether they're a close friend or someone you just met has access to everything you have ever posted. This changes the way we make decisions or judgements because now we have all this information about a person that we didn't have before.
For corporations and companies this helps them with advertising and public relations. If someone has posted something negative about a product or service the company can address it directly or start working on the problem so that their customers are happy. Advertising has become so much easier in my opinion for companies because they have access to the information about their customers such as their life style. This helps them creates ads specifically designed to target their audience and help them grow their business.
The weird part about seeing what other people post is that it can be addicting. Why do we want to constantly know about everyone else at all times? Scientists have called this "ambient awareness" where we find the information of our friends interesting and sometimes addictive. The problem with this is that we don't really need to ever see a person to actually know what's going on in their life.
The amount of face to face conversation is slowly going down and because of that we are becoming more and more secluded. We can't convey the same emotions through a screen than we could face to face. For example if our friend's pet fish died then we would try to comfort them and make them feel better. Over social media that would look like a few lines of text and some emojis. That social interaction that we're missing is critical to our emotional well being. Through these interactions we learn to build trust and learn empathy towards others.
Personally I believe that all this sharing of information is too much to deal with. In the future we could just plug ourselves into the internet and just live online like some episode of futrama. I find it incredibly frustrating that people want to share all this information online without any physical interaction at all. I personally don't want to stay at home talking with someone over the internet when we could be outside talking or doing something else.
Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/fashion/02BEST.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html
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