Before Facebook was launched in 2004, Wikipedia was the most prominent face of social media: what Wikipedia essentially represented was free information sharing (apart from providing a structure for the exercising of a collective social responsibility). After February 2004, the increased penetration of the social media tools into communities resulted in the conspicuous breakage of borders.
Consequently, products that addressed themselves to certain demographics found it harder to utilize the business value of such divisions, finding the way into the future being led not by the social parameters that were unaffected but by those that were indeed affected by social networking. People were confused and wanted to "belong" somewhere, to the same extent (if not more) as they did earlier, and so began to form communities on the web.
However, demand and supply of certain necessities were beginning to become skewed as well because, with increased social participation and representation, access to products began to increase. Therefore, users no longer came together based on what they needed as much as what they thought needed preservation in the face of a loss of context: their interests. In fact, both Facebook and Wikipedia have only magnified or downplayed necessities, and outright changes have not been effected simply because social media has not substituted any other social institution any of whose functions it replicates more efficiently.
Perhaps the most detrimental move at this point would be to attempt to institutionalize processes for the purpose of evaluation or commercial utilization. As technological advancements continue to happen, trying to create borders and limit the pervasion of continuity could very well result in the rigidization of such borders because discrimination at this point of time is bound to result in separately evolving data architectures and platforms, perhaps growing to acquire a significantly different morphology.
Being all complex mechanisms with which to express ourselves in essence, products and services like the smartphones, tablets, blogs, e-mail, and social networks will come to replace existing social mechanisms in their entirety.
For example, with the advent of citizen journalism and the easy access to blogging tools, information distribution systems such as media establishments will have to reorganize everything from their attitude toward journalism to their revenue models constantly. At some point, when broadband penetration has hit a maximum, for example, the fall of the newspaper will begin to accelerate drastically because news will no longer remain a commodity to be purchased but interactions with which are taken for granted.
When the trajectory of connectivity becomes flattened, when there exists the politico-economic gap mandated between those well-connected and those loosely distributed, any product and service created to enhance the experience of "being connected" is going to result in a bloating, resulting in an eventual defiance of its growth trends and a collapse into the primeval form of a newly-birthed successor trend: the direct deployment of the social network.
*
Beyond which point can it be said that humankind's access to the destructive elements of common technology has begun? I believe that it is our skin - the violation of our biological construction. All that has transpired in the past has been the result of the continued constitution of social institution.
And, for as long as we don't willingly violate that constitution, for as long as we continue to serve our naturally mandated purpose, for as long as we don't interfere with the evolutionary process, I think we ought to be safe from the harmful consequences of letting technology associate with us closely.
No comments:
Post a Comment