Unintended Uses of Social Media
Social media is now commonplace. When my mother signed up for Facebook, I knew that Web 2.0 technologies had gone from revolutionary to establishment. There are now more people on Facebook than live in the United States. But I have increasingly noticed that the use of these tools is still in its infancy in some ways. What a social media tool is good for and what it isn’t is still a subject of experimentation. That kind of experimentation is healthy. For instance, Twitter never marketed itself as a tool for overthrowing repressive governments but it’s now helping people around the world push for more freedoms.
But in some cases unintended uses can lead to some pitfalls. Take the case of Twitter that I mentioned above. It was widely reported that the company planned to take down its service for maintenance during the Iranian protests in 2009. In order to aid the protestors, the State Department contacted Twitter to request that it keep the service up. Supporting protests against repressive governments was not in the original Twitter business plan, but reality and the creativity of Iranians intervened.
On the more personal and far less consequential note, I’ve noticed an increase in work colleagues sending Facebook friend requests. I had always clearly delineated professional contacts to LinkedIn or maybe Twitter. I don’t want a business partner looking at my vacation pictures or what a high school friend might have decided to post on my wall, but I also don’t want to damage a relationship by rejecting a friend request.
Another more serious example I’ve seen recently has been the use of Facebook during disaster responses in South and Midwest. It’s been an incredibly useful tool in helping to organize donations, find missing family members and friends, and generally exchange information—but it has limitations. I was looking through a Facebook page dedicated to Joplin and realized that all the good information there was extremely difficult to search. Facebook, without additional apps (getMYLIFEback, for example) and an additional set of steps, only allows you to search the posts on the current page. To search all of them you need to scroll down and repeatedly press the “more posts” link. With hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of comments, this becomes unmanageable and good information gets lost.
What this really comes down to for me is that people tend to use the communications tools they are comfortable with—the ones they use daily—as their default. They do this whether or not the tool they use is the best for a given situation. If you are on Facebook and need to get out a message that you are okay after a twister blows through town, you are going to use Facebook. You aren’t going to sign up for an account on Twitter, learn about hashtags, get some followers, and then send out a tweet. I think we’ll just have to get used to this phenomenon and develop work-arounds or new aggregating tools to avoid some of the pitfalls. It’s a challenge for all of us to consider.
Comments