Is Social Media Making Us More Dumber?

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?