#18 - Social networking

#18 of 23 things

I'm sort of ambivalent about social networking sites. I don't have a MySpace page, and I really don't ever intend to get one. I don't look down on people who do, but this blog is about as public as I care to get with my life online.

That said, I've posted on forums and communicated with "buddies" (usually from those forums) via Instant Messenger and chat programs for years. I know that those things can help spread information very quickly, so it seems quite likely to me that social networking sites would be at least as effective - probably more effective than IMs, at least, since with that you're usually only talking to one person at a time.

Certainly social networks can be used to disperse information, but their actual "impact" is much harder to judge. There are about a million (well not quite, but it can certainly seem that way sometimes) ways to hear about something nowadays. Are social networks a source of information? Yes, I think they are. Can they be used to spread important or useful information? I don't see why not. Will such information spread as quickly as the latest "news" about what troubled entertainer is back in rehab? Probably not, but that's not the fault of either the information or the network system itself.