Iliyana's Blog

How Social Are We Really?

[fa icon="calendar"] 01-Sep-2014 10:00:00 / by Iliyana Stareva

Social media is booming! The new wild world of communications and social interactionsPeople spend 6.35 hours per month on Facebook; almost half of all Twitter users tweet at least once a day; there are more than 20 billion images shared on Instagram; more than two users sign up on LinkedIn every second; 100 hours of video are uploaded on YouTube per minute... No surprise social media is now the top activity on the Internet, with 60% of that time spent on mobile devices not desktops computers.

But how social are we really?

And by that I don't mean how active we are on social media, but how is it that we use our social skills to facilitate interaction and build relationships with others?

As an avid social media user, I firmly believe that all these new channels have allowed us to broaden our palette of ways to communicate. They have given us more opportunities to connect with individuals from all over the world and exchange information, ideas and knowledge.

On the other hand, one could argue that we might be losing our sense for face-to-face interactions.

No matter how much technology advances (for example, the use of sound and video, or Google Glass, wearable technology, smart watches and other geeky stuff), there is one element that is still difficult to transmit or sense to a full extent via the Web.

That element is emotion. Or the touch of all our five senses.

You can't feel a spark via the Internet, because chemistry is physical.

Of course, social media has allowed us to meet amazing people from all over, which couldn’t have been possible 20 years ago simply because of the geographical distance. Meaningful relationships do start online and are then translated into the real world – I have done so so many times.

But don’t you feel overwhelmed by your virtual connections sometimes?

We are overconnected, overexposed, oversocial…

We talk (a lot!), but do we always listen?

On the social web, the egosystem is flourishing.

We place ourselves front-and-centre of our social graphs. As Robert Phillips puts it, a new era of citizen-centric authority is upon us.

Human systems have evolved and so have our forms of social relations and networks of influence.

Our connected devices have allowed us to interact, connect and communicate in a super convenient, whenever-we-want and wherever-we-want way.

The time factor is now. The where factor is here.

 

 

This, in turn, has changed the way we socialize online and in person.

We meet new people online. We develop relationships and build friendship with people from the other side of the world – people we have never met personally and probably never will.

Due to this accelerated pace of interaction our social graphs have become bigger and bigger. We "know" more people and we get to know more people faster.

But our devices have become smarter too. They are interconnected and interdependent, amassing an enormous amount of evolving and exponentially growing data that combined builds a unified ecosystem of intelligent things.

 

 

The pace of interconnectedness and device-smartness is not slowing down:

The Internet of Things has now become the Internet of Everything.

Video and mobile are here to stay and reign the future.

But how good is this impressive technological development for our advancement as social human beings?

Some say, the Internet and social channels have allowed us to build wannabe personas and hide behind carefully designed masks to present the perfect picture of the perfect image, but not the picture of the real us.

Others go on to further argue that social media has killed our ability to have a normal face-to-face conversation, making us socially awkward and ruining our social skills.

Everything is now out there – it's public knowledge.

We can garner any information we want – e-stalking is powerful. And available.

We are getting super familiar with one another's lives – we know what our friends had for dinner thanks to Instagram; we know where they went for dinner thanks to Foursquare; we know who they went to dinner with thanks to tagging them on Facebook; we know what they didn't like about their meal thanks to a complaint on Twitter; I can go on... We don't need our friends to tell us how they spent their evening, because we already know everything that happened thanks to social media.

Privacy is a myth.

What's more, we are so consumed by our devices that we need a shocking disaster or an accident to make us open our eyes and see the world around us.

Don't agree with me? Then why did this campaign by Volkswagen go crazy viral?

 

 

But then on the other hand, social media has opened up the channels for massive global collaboration and co-creation, crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding.

Thanks to all those possibilities to meet and connect with people around the globe just with a single tweet, people, businesses and organizations can 'get together', innovate and create smarter products and markets.

And another thing – we now get to meet inspiring individuals and build long-lasting friendships with people we would normally never ever get the chance to get to know (not just in business). And maybe those relationships are few, but they are precious and some of them are for life.

We can go on and on and on with the many pros and cons, which is why I don't think there is a definitive answer to whether the Internet and social media have improved or destroyed our social skills.

I think it's very personal – for some it is a positive development, for others it may not be.

But whatever your opinion is, the world of communications and relationships has changed. We need to make peace with that, understand it and embrace it in whatever way we feel comfortable.

Because the Internet and the social web are not going anywhere.

If we want to be part of that world, we need to adjust to the way it's changing.

 

What's your verdict?

How social are we really?

Topics: Social Media

Iliyana Stareva

Written by Iliyana Stareva

Iliyana Stareva is the author of Inbound PR - the book that is transforming the PR industry. She's also a keynote speaker and a consultant in inbound and digital for fast-growing companies and agencies. Currently, Iliyana is Chief of Staff to the EMEA President at ServiceNow. Before that, she held global and EMEA-wide positions at Cisco and HubSpot. She is also certified by the PMI as a Project Management Professional (PMP)®. In her free time, you can find Iliyana writing for her blog, dancing salsa or travelling the world.

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