Friday Funk: Desensitized by Social Media
June 26th, 2009 by Allison Kulage
Picture it: a hot and steamy day in Cincinnati, June 25th, 2009. I sit at my desk, the comforting glare of dual monitors glowing as I peck away at the keyboard. TweetDeck is on my right monitor, scrolling away as I glance over from time to time to see what my fellow “Tweeps” are babbling on about. I notice that the comments all start referring to Farrah Fawcett’s recent passing. I say “huh… that’s a shame” and then it’s back to keyword research. The tag cloud shifts from keywords like Iran and Vote to Farrah, Fawcett, Dies, Cancer, etc. The shift of information being talked about most on Twitter couldn’t have been more dramatic. A few hours later, Michael Jackson became the biggest keywords in the tag cloud. Again, my response was, “huh… that’s a shame”, and then back to writing that email.
Do you sometimes find yourself desensitized by social media, or even the Internet as a whole? A site like Twitter, and even a tool like TweetDeck that shows that lovely little tag cloud with the most frequently used keywords in Tweets at that moment brings news of any kind from any place right to my desktop. I remember my reaction when I first learned of the Hudson River plane crash from Tweets of people watching from their office windows as it happened. I thought it was pretty cool to get such a live news account of an event. Yet, these things happen frequently, every day, and there’s a theory that it’s desensitizing us.
So what do you think? Are you so bombarded by every kind of sensational news that you are becoming numb to it all? Or do you still find the balance between reality and cyberspace? Wherever you are, we invite you to turn off your computer this weekend, shut down the Twitter alerts on your phone, and get out there and just enjoy life. But before you do, take a look at this interesting video we found for our Friday Funk and decide for yourself: does social media desensitize us? You might just say, “huh… that’s a shame” and get right back to your task of the day.
June 28th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
I took your advice and went camping. It was a tad warm on the trails, but the computer was the farthest thing from my mind.