As my group’s second drive of change is the importance of social interaction, today what I wanted to explore through my research was human interaction, comparing interaction through face to face contact and contact through such mediums as the internet.
I came across this blog post from 2008 (http://therealmccrea.com/2008/04/28/the-evolution-of-my-social-media-interactions/) which spoke of a profound transformation in media we are in, a “seismic shift as the web becomes more social” (McCrea, 2008). McCrea predicted that the pace of change will accelerate dramatically as an open social web unleashes a wave of innovation where sites, applications and devices that harness a new “who you know” layer of the internet becomes vital. Even though it is barely three years since this post was written, already you can see a big change in how we use the internet. As mentioned in the post, people are excessively blogging and microblogging. Facebook and Twitter are major social networks and keeping up with all these things make “sometimes feel like a full-time job”. Rather than being a full-time job, I believe that social networking has become the norm, and not just for a particular age group but everyone.
Referenced McCrea’s blog was another blogger, Louis Gray. Gray posted his social media consumption (http://blog.louisgray.com/2008/04/my-social-media-consumption-workflow.html). which I thought was very interesting to look at. On an average day he begins on his email before moving to Google Reader, Twitter, FriendFeed and then may follow on to activity on a few other irregular social media sites. Having read that it also made me think to my own social media workflow, and that of my friends. My own experiences are as relevant to the creation of this driver. I believe McCrea is right in that we are in a time where the importance of social media is fast becoming more revolutionary. I believe this will only increase from now until 2030, and subsequently there will be less face to face interaction leading to that loss of social skills, or that loss in desire to possess social skills.
annamariegruber 