The social media in their present form represent a huge threat to us all. Instant-mass-detached social bonding at a highly superficial level is distorting our grasp of reality on a massive scale, taking over our lives and changing our perceptions of the world. We are losing our sense of proportion and letting hype and half truths dominate our natural powers of reasoning.
The crowd has always acted far differently from individuals motivated from within their own consciousness and now a new form of virtual crowd dynamics has been born.
When social networking first emerged as a phenomenon a decade ago the focus of criticism was on privacy and security issues. Early examples of virtual crowding, such as the rapid online messaging that helped to generate the “Arab spring” were seen by many people as beneficial and therefore welcome. Proof, indeed, that Facebook and Twitter were making it possible for popular democratic movements to emerge and develop their own instant vox pop.
But the same buzz of rapid online interaction can also produce the mentality of the lynch mob and can even facilitate acts of terrorism far distant from their points of origin – like the recent shootings in Canada and those acts of senseless protest and collective hysteria that are currently taking place in Hong Kong.
What the Hong Kong government is offering its population is a set of far more democratic rights than in the past – and certainly much more freedom than was allowed under British rule up to 1997. Yet this point is lost on a generation more intent on what they read on the screens of their smart phones than evidence and logic that can be achieved through independent research and private reflection. This allows the social media to be hijacked by radical movements that project their marginal views as dynamic versions of reality into the mundane lives of young people who have yet to gain a strong sense of personal identity.
The other threat presented by social media is undermIning modern economies in a more direct way. The compulsive attachment to online communications has invaded the workplace – leading to a major drop in productivity. An increasing number of employees are spending quieter moments during working hours talking, texting or QQing to their cyber friends rather than doing tasks like clearly up their computer inboxes, improving their work-related skills and know-how or even sorting out the clutter on their desks.
In some cases this addiction extends into the core of workplace activities and renders employees ineffective. This is particularly a problem where work outputs cannot be measured on a short-term basis or personal online activity cannot be observed by colleagues. It has made, for instance, all home-based jobs that it is not possible to monitor by computer use a highly risky HR option.
If online social networking, and its less problematic cousin business networking, is to have real positive value it will be as a tool providing greater scope for global one-to-one connectivity. Digital communications should be at the service of more traditional forms of interaction. That is why I founded butN last year and recently launch butN as a business networking community – the avenue through which an individual can meet another individual face-to-face in order to improve both their professional lives.
To join the expanding butN community go to http://www.butn.co