Okay, I won't begin with how Twitter-beat-Facebook-beat-Internet-beat-TV...quicker and quicker in terms of popularity or user base -- we are now beyond that stage.
I'll begin instead with how everyone is perplexed about this "social media thing". As I write this, new social media agencies are being set up, articles are being written about this *phenomenon* (including this one, if you can call this post an article), and the marketing pros are figuring out whether to suck at the Vampire widget or indulge in a Mob War to reach their target group.
The point is, the buzz around social media (btw, did we have anti- or un-social media before that?) is growing.
At the same time, some are even beginning to wonder if we could indeed be outgrowing Facebook. Lane Wallace of The Atlantic magazine says, for instance, that we might be at a stage where our initial, teenager-like fancy to FB may give way to fatigue or boredom. Still she admits that sites like FB and Twitter are growing and becoming increasingly popular with 30-plus folks and not just teeny-boppers.
Something doesn't gel, isn't it?
I think if we look close enough -- at human behavior, not websites or widgets -- we'll discover that the process of social evolution takes a long time (Darwin already told us that anatomical evolution takes even longer). In contrast, the breakneck technological evolution of the past decade or so has thrown up numerous tools and twitgets (note that!) for humans to play around.
So it's a playground out there, all right. But unlike earlier, when people played in more segregated age groups, in the virtual world we now have a whole smorgasbord of pre-teens, teens and umpteens 'behaving' in unprecedented ways. Combine this with the fact that this interplay goes on in several handshakes of connected gadgets, irrespective of where the players move across the globe. (We even have extreme cases in which people are being de-addicted for being too connected!)
Personally, I feel that the new tools of staying connected and sharing have brought out the kids in adults and allowed younger people to acquire wisdom or knowledge at an accelerated pace. If anything, the contours of our age-tied and time-bound behaviors are being pummeled into newer and more possibilities -- of what communication and sharing in this or the next digital world (Web x.0) will be really like.
So it's only natural that there's so much complexity and perplexity. I guess it'll be a progressive case of profusion - confusion - infusion (until more things come up and the cycle repeats).
Keep your fingers clicking...
