Social media experts and representatives from the big networking sites met in Davos this January, for the World Economic Forum, to discuss what is apparently “the second biggest human activity after sleeping.” While I’m sure it was filled with sweeping generalizations and hopeful rhetoric of a digital revolution, I haven’t had time to watch the entire 2 hour YouTube video on the subject.
Filled with somewhat meaningless statistics (25 million Twitter accounts, a ton of which are bots and spammers or inactive), the focus was mostly on how companies could use social media to improve their products. I understand it was supposed to be somewhat basic, but most of what I’ve seen isn’t all that informative, interesting, or more than common sense. Follow a few social media blogs and try out social media yourself for a few weeks, and you too could catch on just as quickly. I think a band of tweeting tweens or our social media class could have offered insight on par with this.
Even he can't keep his eyes open...and he's ceramic!
In sum, it seemed to be a lot of buzzwords, not a lot of substance.
However, they did note that they could not survey users under the age of 18, but they expected that those number of users had doubled. The speaker made it sound like 18 and under to 25 was the largest age groups consulting social media sites, and grouped the 30 year olds with 45 year olds. Yet, as far as I have learned, the largest group of internet users is not youths, but those in their 30’s (and this was reported last summer on Mashable as well). I do seem to recall my brother’s best friend’s step-father whooping all of them in online RPG’s…
The only interesting quote I have found on the blogs is this one from LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman:
“All these concerns about privacy tend to be old people issues. ”
This actually had me thinking about a recent project I undertook to learn about my ancestry. So, the first thing I did was Google family member’s names that I was looking for. I discovered the marriage certificate of my great grandmother and grandfather (although his name is mispelled) and the census that noted my great grand mother who lived in the Algoma Region in 1901 with her husband and children.
Wait a minute…these people are dead. Yet I can find their documents, histories and marriage certificates online? They certainly didn’t give permission to ancestry.com to make them findable. If privacy issues are old people issues, our my family members rolling over in their grave? Or is this a great tool so that we can all discover out heritage?
I can only imagine the digital imprint my grand children will find of me online…Hopefully computers will be obsolete by then and we will all live in a world of virtual reality via surrogates.
Are privacy issues “old people” issues, or do the old not even have a say of what we can find out online? When does my birth/marriage/death certificate go up there?
(If you want to learn more, forumblog.org has pretty much cornered the market on bringing together all the resources you can find on the session.)
Communicacianado 