By K.A. Laity
The recent Facebook changes and the Google+ public opening inspire another round of complaint and aghast posts: Facebook is buzzing with it, of course. What irony?! And while there have been angry calls for a mass exodus to Google+, the crickets still chirp over there. Despite the irritation with Facebook's slightly creepy over-management, G+ continues to keep the barriers high to the non-tech savvy.
The latest moves have also elicited the usual handwringing and "reassessment" of social media, like Benjamin Cohen's realisation that he might be using social media—gasp—to feed his ego. Shock!
And yawn!
I got irritated on Twitter the other day by someone tutting about how "we won't be regaling our children with stories of how we tweeted that one thing from our laptop." Well, no—and our forebears did not write about how they were using quills and parchment, either – they just used them! Yes, the medium is a part of the message, Mr McLuhan, but it is not the message.
When the tools are no longer novel, we won't notice them. My velocipede is sooo much better than your antiquated horse. I can't believe anyone uses them anymore! The novelty factor has kept people from noticing that we use social media in the same we do other social interactions; some people need them for ego-fixes, some for feeling close to others, some for making business connections and most of us, for a combination of these and other factors.
People didn't suddenly become vain because of social media: we love to look at ourselves, we love to have our better selves reflected back to us, too. We didn't need Facebook to inspire the questions about how we look in this new outfit or whether someone flirting with you already has a relationship going. How many of us have the most flattering picture we can find as our avatar? How many choose to put their pets or children instead (ample sign of what we'd like people to think of when they see "us").
Does the ability to look things up on Wikipedia or whatnot weaken our ability to memorise facts? Yes, probably – but on the plus side, we're using our brains in other ways than simple rote memorization. That's a good thing: more complex relational thinking is always good. It's a pity our schools lag so far behind real life that we're still emphasizing memorization as primary evidence of skills acquired. We have to train ourselves and our children in new information gathering techniques as well as those crucial critical thinking skills that help us sort through the avalanche of information that these new tools offer.
K. A. Laity writes so much that she had to create some pseudonyms to keep her colleagues from thoughts of torture. A tenured medievalist at a small liberal arts college, she mostly tries to find ways to avoid meetings in order to write more. At present she's in Galway as a Fulbright Scholar, blogging about it, wittering on Facebook and on Twitter as she reports from the finest pubs in Ireland.