Social Media can open our eyes to the value of physical life

Joining such powerful critics of the social media revolution as Oxford neuroscientist Baroness Lady Susan Greenfield, Archbishop Nichols noted the “transiency” and dehumanisation of social life on community networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Citing the tragic example of a 15-year old Macclesfield schoolgirl who committed suicide after being being bullied by other teenagers on Bebo, Archbishop told the Sunday Telegraph at the weekend that social media websites were failing to educate young people about the rich complexity of human interaction.

In America, critics of the social media revolution are also growing in strength. One of the most popular books of the summer is Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, a gently defiant defense of physical labour in the age of the digital social network. Much less gentle, but equally defiant is Digital Barbarism, a spirited polemic by the American novelist Mark Helprin, which accuses social media of everything from wrecking the physical economy of culture to destroying human literacy and personal conversation.

Unfortunately, many social media evangelists don’t seem to listening to these critics. For all the manifold warnings about the impact of social media, there is still a common belief amongst social media utopians that network communities are uniting rather than dividing human beings. Take, for example, the forthcoming new book (to be published in the US on September 3 by Portfolio) by Shel Israel, appropriately entitled Twitterville, which claims the “conversational era” puts an end to the constraint of geography and enables the flowering of “global neighborhoods.”

Meanwhile, the war between social media evangelists goes on unabated. Even the normally peaceful Telegraph blogs have been aflutter and abuzz this week, both for and against Archbishop Nichols’ remarks, with one ideological flank arguing that social media is dangerously dividing us while the other uncompromising flank argues the exact reverse.

So what’s it to be then: is social media the beginning or the end of western civilisation?

Or is it possible that the “conversational era” is actually more complex and ambivalent than the Manichaean pronouncements of both religious critics such as Archbishop Nichols and high priests of social media like Shel Israel?
This possibility of a third way was something that I discussed today with Mr Social Media himself, Robert Scoble, when I drove down to his home in Half Moon Bay, a small town on the Pacific coast, just a short message over the Santa Cruz mountains from Silicon Valley.

More than anyone else in the Valley, it has been this genial ex Microsoft technologist, who under the online moniker of Scobleizer, has evangelised social and conversational digital media.

It was Scoble who, in 2006 with Shel Israel, published Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk to Customers – one of the most communitarian books about blogging.

It was Scoble whose endless championing of Twitter seduced non-geeks like myself into getting hooked on micro-blogging.

And today it’s Scoble who is now championing FriendFeed, the open-source social media network built by a team of ex-Google engineers which has seized the imagination of the hardcore geeks in social medialand.

As we sat alone in his high tech office, with its plasma-sized computer screen spewing out Friendfeed messages by the micro-second, I asked Scoble if online friendship was fostering real social relationships, thereby creating genuine friendships and deeper and more meaningful communities.

“Ah, the archbishop,” Scoble jokingly referred to the Vincent Nichols storm which, of course, he’d read all about on Twitter and Friendfeed.

But my conversation with Scoble did reveal some of the problems with our new conversational age. He acknowledged that social media made him closer, more familiar with people on the other side of the world who he’d met on the Internet.

“We’ve set up our lives so that we don’t have to deal with our neighbours,” Scoble explained, rather tiredly. “We’ve replaced our physical community with a community of tags through which we can choose our friends.”

Friendship, according to Scoble, is the key scarcity in the social media age. He talked about something called “Friend divide” which has replaced the “digital divide” as the key difference between the haves and the have-nots of the social media age. The more friends you have online, Scoble explained, the more power you have. Thus it’s digital aristocrats like him, with his 100,000 followers on Twitter, who, he acknowledges, hold the real power in our conversational age.

In contrast, however, with many of today’s social media evangelists, Scoble – who has admitted to spending hundreds of hours annually on social networks – is not a digital ultra. He confessed that interaction on the computer is not an adequate replacement for the physical. Today’s social media is like the telephone, Scoble explained. It simply represents a means rather than an end to human interaction.

“What we are really yearning for is intimacy,” Scoble told me. The more time we spend on the network, the more we yearn for interesting conversation, for small dinner parties with longtime friends, for walks on the beach with our wife and kids.

Social media has made him “hungry for intimacy,” he confessed. The more he existed on the network, the more he wanted to see a live comedian or sit at a front row of a Eric Clapton concert or eat sushi in Tokyo.

“This world is telling you that there’s another world out there,” Scoble said to me, sweeping his arm dismissively toward the pixilated Friendfeed page with his thousands of friends, most of whom he had never and would never meet in person.

Herein, I suspect, lies the third way – the rocky, complex terrain between the extreme ideologies of social media dystopians and utopians. Whereas Archbishop Nichols sees social media as destroying our appreciation for the complexity of the physical world, Scoble views it as the reverse – as creating an appetite for that complexity.

The social media crowd has created a religion out of the concept of “conversation”. But Scoble – who has always been a Tweet or two ahead of the mob – might well now be leading the geeks to a genuine conversation about social media. I suspect that his “yearning for intimacy” will soon become the yearning of the rest of the social media crowd.

And then, rather than “transiency” or “dehumanisation”, social media will actually result in a greater appreciation for the richness and depth of real human interaction. How odd, how strangely appropriate, then, that our obsession with the digital will eventually bring us to fully appreciate the value of physical life. (Via Telegraph)

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