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Is Social Media Making Us More Dumber?
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Are we losing our content to a great black hole
Ever since I read this article about Scoble back in December of last year blogs have been at the forefront of my mind and specifically the fact that people are updating them less purely due to the fact that we are spending so much time on social media. I think that is a bad thing.
There was all the controversy a few months ago when Wired said that blogs were dead and to a certain extent they have a point but thankfully blogs will never die like they say, they are however going through a state of neglect at the moment. People are too busy updating their status, sending in pictures by Twitter and reading people’s feeds to have time to write great content. This is a massive shame. The problem is two-fold in that not only are the best bloggers not updating their blogs as often but when they do they tend to update with shorter posts.
Sites like posterous and Tumblr are becoming popular because they require an absolute minimum amount of work, they are essentially photo and link sharing sites where people share their most basic thoughts. This real time sharing of information is great and it opens up lots of great opportunities around instant search and interaction but is it making us dumber? Think about it…A tweet, status update or video shared on posterous is pretty much useless a couple of days after posting and in the case of Twitter your tweet will be erased after a certain amount of time anyway. To this day I use blogs as a reference tool for a wide variety of topics leaning on the knowledge of vastly experienced writers who offer great insight from their industry often with practical advice I can implement. What will I be able to do with one of Scoble’s Tweets in 6 months time?
Are we losing our bloggers to social media and their content to a great big black hole that is social media? Is the web becoming too fluid and too instant? Is this making us all dumber?
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Good point Niall – I do think there’s a difference to being a blogger and having a blog though. I’d reckon all the people I would count as “bloggers” still update, post and publish, as well as engage in social media, while those who got a blog to just have one are doing so less. Then with the advent of group blogs and the like, people tend to post less on their own and more on the other ones.
I wouldn’t say we’re losing bloggers – if anything the vast amount of information is opening up their blogging input like never before. It is however a matter of time, too. It’s the difficulty of doing something and then having to blog about it too.
Yeah all the big bloggers abd pro guys are all still around alright but I think the barrier is slightly higher now for people looking to get in to blogging. Not that the barrier is higher but just that Twitter and Facebook is a great way for people to express themselves and less are taking the step up to full blogging. Apart from businesses, they are getting in to blogging in a big way because a bunch of us are telling them that it is a smart thing to do, which it is.
I presume the blog title is ironic…”…more dumber….” (sic)
I do agree with the general tone of the post and especially that the web is becoming too fluid….
I agree with Daragh – you both in fact. I think bloggers are bloggers, and once the twitter novely wears off a little, the distracted bloggers, who have something to say, will say it. I found I blogged less when tweeting, and now I do both. It just takes balance. They are different forms of social media, and serve different functions… you just need to try them to find where the balance lies for you, or your company. Blogging takes thought, tweeting much less so, and maybe many blogs were too long and self indulgent before twitter anyway. Shorter blogs are often better, getting to the point quicker. I also think twitter has taught many bloggers the value of pics and video links.
For the most part I’d disagree. If people used to blog things that can now be shared via facebook or twitter – “look at this new video”, “check out this cool link” etc. – then I think it’s only a good thing for the state of blogging. I’ve noticed that my rss reader has become less clogged with repeated posts from different people about the same thing (e.g. several people posting the one viral video or the latest announcement from apple). For me this is a good thing. I get that content through twitter & facebook, it doesn’t need to be archived and I don’t mind if I miss some of it, and now I read & enjoy a much higher proportion of posts that pop into my rss reader – even if there are less posts by each blogger.
There is one area that I would agree with you however, and that’s with regards to time. Is it making us dumber? – No. Is it wasting much of our time? – probably. Here I can see a conflict with blogging, whereby somebody, instead of writing a great blog post, sends a couple of tweets or sits on facebook for an hour (or watches too many youtube clips – my personal poison!).
We all know that a well written, good quality post takes time, and I would agree that time spent on other “lighter” social media sites could pose a danger to this. I’d agree with Emmet that the novelty will wear off twitter a bit, and the serious bloggers might return to writing more frequent posts.
Peter agree with he duplicate content and a good thing is that on Twitter unlike blogs people will have seen it and RT instead of blogging it again and putting their spin on it. I suppose it is more a time waster than making us dumber as a lot of the social stuff I waste my time on is pretty decent content but I do also watch the cats falling off roofs on YouTube