Social Media is the World We Live In. But is it Good or Bad? I Say Good!

Recently in my class, Specialty Writing For The Web, we were assigned to read an article named Now You See It, Soon You Won’t. It was an article in the New York Times Opinion section by Jesse Kornbluth. Basically it goes over how he believes that the social media movement is a bad thing for the American people. The article takes an especially hard look at Twitter and the use of trending.

For those of you who don’t know, trending is something or someone that is the center of attention on Twitter.

“In a simpler world, trending would be harmless, the equivalent of baseball fans checking batting averages on a daily basis. But in a media culture that cares nothing about the past or the future, it’s one more way of narrowing our attention spans – this time, to the 140-character limit of a Twitter communication. (I can’t bring myself to say “tweet.”),” Kornbluth said. “Indeed, it’s the very apotheosis of our A.D.D. media world, jerking our attention from one superheated story to another, never penetrating the surface or suggesting that some stories matter more than others.”

Throughout the article, he gives plenty of facts about what is trending, such as, “This week, nearly 1,600,000 people – in 24 hours – watched the Facebook video of a soldier calling home from Germany to tell his parents that he was gay.”

While that may be true, he also brought up one thing as a negative that I believe is one of the most important reasons the social media movement is so wonderful. “A few weeks ago, a Stanford kid got lost hiking in Malaysia. His friends Facebooked like mad. This made him trending, thus worthy of a search.”

The Stanford kid he is referring to is named Jacob Boehm. On Aug. 13, he let everyone know he was in Malaysia, and then no one heard from him for a week. His parents were worried, so they emailed a dozen of his friends to ask if they could use social media to track him down.

Soon, thousands of people took to Twitter, Facebook and other sites to get the news out and to potentially find the missing man. Facebook employees posted ads about him in both English and Malay. Soon after that the U.S Embassy got involved. And less than 24 hours after Boehm became a cause, rangers found him in Taman Negara National Park.

It turns out he was just hiking. The park doesn’t get cell phone or Internet reception, and apparently the kid didn’t think to mention this to anyone.

As Boehm’s mother told one blog, “Clearly it was the power of social media that helped us find him.”Seeing this story made me think, how many stories are there just like this own out there? Within seconds of searching, I found a ton more including an articles named, “Girl, 2, saved by Facebook after family friend spots eye cancer in photo taken by mother”.

The article tells a story about how a nurse named Nicola Sharp was browsing through her friend Michele Freeman’s profile when she saw a photograph of Michele’s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Grace that looked a little fishy. Grace’s life was saved when Sharp noticed that the flash photograph showed Grace with a white pupil in her left eye instead of the ‘red eye’ tint most people would have – a sign of eye cancer. She was found to have two tumors and lost all sight in her left eye. Medics told Michele if the cancer had spread it could have been fatal.

Looking at these two examples, how can anyone say that the social networking movement is a bad thing? While, yes, at times people use it for things that aren’t all that important, other times Facebook or Twitter can help save a life or two.


People also view

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *