I'm been noticing a strange phenomena in my social networking lately. Maybe it's more of a malady.
This becomes a little frustrating to me. Nothing is as annoying as having putting hours of work into a serious and thought-provoking status and hearing crickets in response. Then you follow this up a day laters with some humorous comment and it gets flooded with Likes, LOLs, and ROFLs.
An odd feature of this disease is that it doesn't seem to affect people on Google+. Maybe Google, with all it's intelligence, was able to design an antidote. Maybe the people who use Google+ are naturally immune to it.
Maybe this is the reason that Facebook reminds me so much of an oversized youth group. I've been in good youth groups, but I've also seen many youth groups which left me wondering if the youth can't handle anything deeper than LOL.
Am I the only one who has been bothered by the growing numbers of people wearing LOLgles? Is this just to be expected? Can a social network survive long when meaningful data can't - or won't - be understood?
Depends... I've seen the use of plenty of LOLgles on G+. None on twitter though, but of course, you hardly have room for anything on twitter from the get-go. XD
ReplyDeleteBut it is disturbing, though I admit I've practiced this many times. Laziness.
I would agree that this is a frustrating phenomenon, but rather than being the result of, or coincident with, social media, I think it is the cause. Our cultural attitude of 'LOLgles' is one of superficiality in communication that avoids hard thinking. It is this laziness and increased superficiality that attracts people to social media like facebook, since it provides a communication venue that does not require anything deeper than the click of a 'like', a 'lol' or a retweet. Because social media is formed around this mentality, I doubt that it can be substantially transformed to convey deeper interactions. Instead we have to personally engage with people through old-fashioned communication devices like... talking! in order to pull off their LOLgles and have a meaningful discussion.
ReplyDeleteHi Sarah, good to see your still yourself, BTW this is Thomas from ConLaw... WELCOME!
ReplyDeleteTCR
Sarah, where's the like button? :)
ReplyDeleteI can't believe how many people think they can be lazy with their language and even their thoughts just because they're surfing the Web. It's misconception at its finest, I'd say, because this vast stretch of IPs is supposed to be a superhighway of information. We're using it for all the wrong reasons - as such, this is why you won't catch me using a social network.
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