Social Media’s Upset: Unexpected Creativity
Author Clive Thompson explains that when social media was first invented, many people were very skeptic about its true value. Many people thought that giving such a vast network of easily accessible information to average people would simply amplify their interest in “trivia and gossip”. Thompson admits that, at the time, he believed that the average person was not intelligent enough to use social media productively; that one would remove oneself from progressive original thought and overflow one’s daily life with non-thought-provoking subjects such as celebrity gossip. In reality, what Thompson found was that social media on a large scale connected people with ideas and interests they would never have otherwise discovered, and that people were using social media in ways and for causes he would never have imagined.
The rise of social media is far from the first time that people have been apprehensive about the effects that new technology could have on society. When the first Walkman was produced, it was manufactured with two jacks so that one could listen to music with another person. The designers of the Walkman were worried that having such personal access to music would isolate people from each other and make us a society of headphone wearing introverts. In reality, this was not the case with the Walkman, and neither was it the case for social media.
Thompson mentions the term of “multiples” which has been used to describe different people who discover shared interests through networks of social media. Instead of one provincial group keeping to very homogenous thoughts and opinions, social media has allowed new ideas to aggregate over a much larger demographic landscape of people, causing a larger diversity of opinion amongst closely knit peers and a fusion of new ideas that bridges cultures and typical social boundaries.
Source:
BBC Future
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140608-how-social-media-makes-us-smarter