I didn't really understand the text at the beginning of this article. It was all very confusing and I was waiting until it got to the point... which I'm still unsure of what the point of the article was until I continued reading towards the end, and the article ended with the words, "That's the social today."
All I understood from that was, the social in social media is all about making connections with other people and I felt that the article did not really need all the extraneous information written from the top to the middle of the page. I guess it did explain some history behind social media and how it started, (which was not of my interest) but then it was also riddled with some jargon I was not familiar with that I had to google. Although it did pick up near the end especially when they discussed this:
"What’s happening?” Everything, even the tiniest info spark provided by the online public, is (potentially) relevant, ready to be earmarked as viral and trending, destined to be data-mined and, once stored, ready to be combined with other details. These devices of capture are totally indifferent to the content of what people say—who cares about your views? That’s network relativism: in the end it’s all just data, their data, ready to be mined, recombined, and flogged off. "
I think its interesting that social media has made reduced the 'importance' of our opinions to meaningless data... maybe not so meaningless but data that is used, mainly for the profit and benefit of growing businesses. The whole concept of data mining also reminds of my boyfriend who is an IT major and is going to be working with data mining and gathering data from social media sites. It makes me wonder if graphic designers could design this data and all this information??
Also this quote was mentioned:
"Keen warns that we will end up in an anti-social future, characterized by the “loneliness of the isolated man in the connected crowd.”16
I disagree with this. I don't believe that the future will become anti social. I feel that people have probably become more connected because of social media.
