The beauty of sites like Twitter and Facebook being invented is that they give us a chance to expand upon our social networking skills by allowing the technology to do most of the work and us to just decipher it. Some benefits include it allowing people to multi-task and not have to devote time to getting to know a person in a physical sense. However, the consequences include us learning the surface of what makes up a person’s personality, and not necessarily getting a deep understanding of who they are. You cannot see their facial expressions through an IM, and all you’re doing through out your cyber contacting is making an educated guess as to who you think they are. Social networking sites and the Internet overall, since their creation, have slowly began to control the thoughts of the individuals reading into them. They have made people more likely to scan blurbs, listen quickly to sound bytes, and Facebook-stalk a person in order to learn about their likes and dislikes. These advents have encouraged their audience to become lazy, because they do most of the work for us, and we don’t need to utilize those inquisitive parts of our brains anymore.
Wikipedia is another example of our now trained-to-be-impatient mindset. This website is a host of information on various topics that may or may not be accurate. Wikipedia allows users like you and I to log on and update whatever is on their site. There is minimal moderation, which means that although everyone has a chance to put their thoughts on, there’s a good chance that what you’re reading is not from an expert. What you have instead is the community’s view, and at times, the community can be warped and biased because of outside influences.
Television shows have the same community views associated with them when there is a successful series. Take for example True Blood, a show about vampires (which already had a community fan base because of Twilight). Followers of the show would update their Twitter and Facebook statuses respectively and post on forums all catering to those interested in the show. They have a chance to put their opinions on the screens of every fans’ computers. Some problems that might have stemmed from that is with instant posts popping up, the readers don’t really give the show a chance to grow on them. If someone gives away an upcoming scene and speaks about it negatively, the other viewers might not want to give it the time of day. It’s like reading reviews that pre-judged all of the time.
Other issues with this kind of crowd-sourcing is that it has pitfalls such as there being difficulty with coming up with a general conclusion that everyone agrees upon, as well as there being written contracts and disclosure agreements. This community of informants make their lives and thoughts less private and more publicly exposed – and from this, they can be accepted or ignored. These specialized online groups have a chance to exchange thoughts in a safe forum, and spread their knowledge to others. There is a sense of an online family or community built because of what they all have in common.
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