The other day Chris Brogan posted about the possibility of a social crash. He argues that with social media there is a lot of hyper-connectivity, which leads to ambient relationships, where we touch people via social media, but don’t necessarily have any further contact. Chris rightly wonders what will happen to all of our relationships with so much hyper connection.
I think while Chris is correct to note the ambient relationships that can be formed via social media, that it is possible to also form meaningful relationships with people on social media sites. Also social media is used to make people aware of situations in other people’s lives and in some cases those connections have pulled together to help someone out, even if they didn’t know the person well.
It’s true that social media makes it possible for even casual connections to stay more connected than they would have before, but I don’t think this will necessarily lead to a social crash. It may actually lead to people being more aware of the people they want to spend quality time with and using social media to stay up on those people’s lives and coordinating getting together with them.
At the same time, being connected to so many more people can be daunting because with many of those people we won’t really get to know them. They will provide us status updates, brief snippets of their lives, and then be gone. It is only with some effort on our part that we’ll be able to significantly make a relationship with them and usually both people will need to see a clear need for that relationship to occur.
Even with said I don’t think a social collapse will occur. Instead what I hope will occur is that people will become more thoughtful and aware of the relationships they chose to cultivate and make more effort to get to know the people who they feel are important to them, using both social media and other forms of communication. That, at least for me, is how I’ve used social media.
