A couple of years the prior, I remember President Obama giving a speech about the great leaps forward in advanced technology we’ve seen recently. He also complimented our entrepreneurs for leading the world forward with such technologies as social networks, and he specifically mentioned Facebook. Personally, I don’t believe this to be “advanced technology” anymore than 3-wheeled vehicles are advanced transportation apparatus.
You might say that; the internet has evolved bringing forth a new dynamic in human social interaction known as social networks, which grew out of the concept of internet forums, blogs, bulletin boards, and personal websites – but it’s a stretch in my opinion to call it advanced technology. Indeed, one might even conclude that social networks are dummying down the American Public something terrible.
The other day, an acquaintance mentioned to me that there are 200 some social networks in the world today. Well, that’s not exactly so, neither is what Obama said in his speech about Facebook. In fact, I’d say that Obama made that comment as he was gaining lots of young first time voter support aligning himself with Facebook early on, his campaign team had a Facebook Strategy and they executed it well as I recall. Now then my acquaintance is incorrect about the 200 social networks, but that shows you how little people really know about these social online networks.
Whereas, it may be true that there are 200 social online networks that people use that are of a certain size, but one must quantify that, for instance there are 200 social networks in the world with over 1 million users. You see, for instance there are 30,000 social networking sites on Ning (dot) com alone. Still, that does not mean that all socialized online networking groups “enhance” society. Indeed, it may actually be devolving society in numerous other ways, making true personal relationships and friendships less important, so we must not give undue credit to these online sites where so many humans congregate.
I’d say that these networks are evolving, and those who do not continually evolve and adapt will fall the way of all those which have come and gone. The more specific niche networks have the best chance to survive long-term with less adaptation, but those which are an all-comers free-for-all must continue to pique the curiosity and interest of the populous or they will surrender their subscriber base to the next new thing. Still, other than the actual platform we call the Internet, I wouldn’t say that “social online networks” are advanced technology. Please consider all this.
