“Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous solitude or to take arms against a sea of networking, and by opposing… fade away.”
I have been watching the progress of Twitter from a distance now for some time, is it really all it’s cracked out out to be? Life before Twitter was surely eventful enough, Do we really need all these ‘social networking’ sites? are we really that lonely? Or, on the other hand, do we really think people value our opinion enough to read the countless amounts of texts posted up there every hour/minute?
Is being interconnected to each other of such importance? On a spiritual level Bhuddism and the Hindu texts would agree that non-dualism is the essence of all life, that we are all connected through consciousness. Does this digital manifestation through the guise of social networking mean that we seek out the essence of non-duality through material means? Still the irony remains, what essentially draws us together is the hope of finding something different, yet through conforming to a format designed to fit all. The irony in this search for individual thought, is that by accepting the terms and conditions of such frameworks, we thus sign over the rights of our individuality to the corporations which host the forum. Yet despite our reservations/doubts and opinions of large corporations we still continue to connect to each other and share our most personal thoughts and feelings through their framework.
I was, like many, slow to catch onto the game, having avoided the My Space era, skeptical about the semination of personal information on the internet and believing it to be but a mere passing trend. Yet despite all my previous doubts I have taken the plunge and become one of you all. Yes I too have facebook, twitter, Linked In, flickr, several email accounts and a blog. I do find the functionality of such things useful, and according to many of the trend “Guru’s” out there, social networking is all the rage. Such a large portion of the population can be found on these sites, that it is now not an uncommon practice for businesses to dedicate a lot of their advertising resources to promoting themselves within these frameworks.
As a designer, with a keen interest in web, there seems to be no end to the amount of programs, code or functionality required to implement when designing for an online community. The technology is in constant flux, and with new widgets, add-ons, plugins and so forth, one wonders when the learning stops and the work begins?