Do you feel like you “get” social media, or do you just use it because that’s where all your friends and family are?

We are social animals and so having a ready source of social satisfaction like Facebook and Twitter is actually kind of obvious and expected. If nobody created such systems we would have eventually grown one. The rewards for a social animal in a social networked world is like a kid in a candy store. We love to share, sometimes for our own mental health and sometimes because we’re intensely curious about other peoples lives and their dramas. We on the surface complain quite loudly when we’re embroiled in other peoples drama but I think deep down we’re on some level intense and very closeted drama whores. This comes out as worry fetishism on one side and vicarious voyeurism on another. The endless curiosity of “What is going on in your life” has been the obsession ever since we started throwing ourselves to the winds and moving far away from the people we claim to love in our families. Families end up being spread all across the country and because we only interact generally annually, which is to say that at most the older you get the number of times you see your loved ones are distinctly limited. We’re a culture hopelessly enraptured by the notion of having your cake and eating it too. We find opportunities in far-away places and we keep the local threads flowing through social networking. In many ways, we are either cheating each other or we are cheating those aforementioned opportunities. Not that any of this cheating is making life less valuable for either party, but it does help keep us connected while we’re very far apart from each other. I contend that as the social structure of family disintegrates, the use of social networking will rise up to meet it. As we spend less and less time with our family, we find more ways to spend more and more time with them virtually. That the social networking infrastructure has created a new sublayer of the noosphere, one where we can regularly socialize with each other with distance abstracted away from the equation by technology.

I only see social networking to become more and more important and I can see us starting to socialize with our technology as well as with each other. Eventually we’ll have relationships with the tools we use to maintain relationships with each other. Eventually there will come a time when we’ll have to socialize these services and make them basic services like running water, electricity, and heat. What comes after that? I can see the technology wrapping around our lives, so we can share our experiences with our loved ones in a way that is both encompassing and ubiquitous in nature. We can actually start seeing this coming true with Google Glass. The only thing that science fiction has dreamt up that we haven’t seen yet is Jarvis, the AI that Marvel’s Tony Stark depends on to help him control his armor. If there was a sociable personality in a pair of Google Glasses, that would be nearly the completion of my entire thesis here. It’s just a matter of time, I think, for that to come true.