Perspectives: “polar opposites”

Originally published on 08 September 2014

Brent Simmons quotes the Waffle weblog, with the following paragraph of interest:

The reason I don’t like social media is that it takes two things that are polar opposites and duct tapes them together. Your own utility — to save links, to write text, to move files or materials, to keep notes, to communicate with yourself in the future, to communicate with some other specific people — and the social media outlet’s desire to fulfill its own objectives first.

The “polar opposites” theory is interesting, and quite the accurate description of what a social media network is.

But part of that “desire to fulfill its own objective first” is somewhat necessary to maintain purpose for a network’s existence. More importantly, it defines the kind of space — or environment — in which people will choose to inhabit and coexist with others.

And within these environments, sub-cultures exist — not so different to life in the real world, where people would socialise with one another based on stereotypical characteristics (e.g. demographics, psychographics), leading to the eventual creation of peer groups.

If one chooses a social media network, it should be embraced in its whole. However, this is never always the case, as possibly demonstrated by those who choose to use Facebook, yet deeply concerned about their privacy — being one of many examples of an “objective”.

In Simmons’s own post, another interesting point was made:

I’ve heard blogs classified as a type of social media. Maybe that’s true, and maybe not — I don’t care.

What I do care about is that my blog isn’t part of a system where its usefulness is just a hook to get me to use it. It works the way I want to, and the company running the servers (DreamHost) doesn’t care one fig what I do.

Blogs don’t fall under the social media umbrella, but rather a subset of a typical, full-fledged web site. Even with a commenting system in place, people exchanging thoughts and ideas doesn’t change the essence of what it truly is.

I enjoy how Twitter offers me a means of self-expression, while at the same time hearing the combined voices of those that I’ve chosen to follow. While it may (sometimes) not work completely in the way that I would like it to, getting accustomed to its ways wasn’t at all painful.

Twitter is, by far, one of the best social media hangouts for me — because it truly works.

And, evidently, I blog too — for the purpose of sharing my own thoughts and theories in a long-read kind of way, which isn’t practical for Twitter. This also works very well for me in its prescribed way.

To put it bluntly, it’s quite alright to not fancy social media because it fails to meet expectations for some. No one ever implied it as being a must-have. We are all free to choose what networks, or peer groups, to be part of (or not).

However, succumbing to peer pressure is a personal choice, and cannot be blamed on others.

Kinny tweets aviation, social media and technology on Twitter.