Social Media Social Revolution

Social media have proven to be especially good for making connections whether horizontally, between friends, or vertically, between advertisers and consumers and the like.

But social media seem to have the reputation of being a little fluffy; probably because the dominant uses of them thus far have been social in the lightest sense of the term.

However, social media have proven themselves to be a powerful platform for disseminating messages; marketing becomes highly effective when targeted at specific groups using information inputted through social media networks.

And let’s not forget about blogs and forums; often used for information sharing and collaboration.

The Death of the Wave

Google has announced that it will no longer be developing it’s Wave web application. RIP. The technology was incredibly innovative, with tools such as context linked spell-check, that could truly begin to revolutionise the way that web applications, and/or browsers work.

Real-time collaboration seemed to be such a wonderful idea. When I first heard about wave from an incredibly excited Rhodes Computer Science Honours student I imaged groups of people, all sitting at their own computer in their own spaces, in their own time-zones working on long and interesting documents – perhaps environmental policies, or proposals for projects to liberate women – but it seems that the reality isn’t as rosy.

Downsides to Doing it Digitally

The average human being will most likely scoff at the idea of having a virtual relationship which isn’t in some way routed in the real world. When we think of the word ‘relationship’ we think of a coffee-date, movies-on-your-night-off, come-to-my-place-for-dinner real world thing. 

We understand the difference between the relationships we have with our parents, our friends, our lovers and our teachers or work colleagues (at least, most of the time). But most of us, and I’m including myself in this, can’t fathom an online only relationship. It makes no sense that something starts and ends in a virtual space.