What the fuck ever happened to sitting down with your thoughts, pen in hand, and writing a physical letter to someone? You know, something real, something that actually exists, that can actually stand the test of time??
Or for God's sake even picking up the telephone and calling a friend or family member instead of Internetting them???
I've found that communicating with people electronically--especially friends and personal acquaintances, tends to warp my relationship with them.
I am much more likely to be a bombastic, controversial prick in my e-mail communications. Safely behind a keyboard, separated by the wide, anonymous, somewhat creepy expanse of the Internet netherworld, I feel like I can write anything to a friend online and get away with it.
All the subtlety and nuance of face to face communicating--which is so critical, is lost electronically: hand gestures, voice intonation, the look into one's eyes.
If I told half of my friends in person what I tell them over the Internet, I'd be getting into a ton of physical altercations.
Facebook, in my eyes, has already hit its tipping point and is on the decline. It has jumped the shark, so to speak. No one has ever told me what exactly it does, and as of yet no one makes any money on it.
All of this shit twenty years from now will be looked on mainly as being a fad. Sure, there's a place for e-mail in the world and there always will be.
But all the other stuff is mostly bullshit. Fads that have already peaked and are on their way down.
2 comments:
You're a bombastic, controversial prick in real life so it's not just your emails....
You could never be more wrong on this assumption. You're looking at the use of these tools from the business perspective of profiting off of them, rather than the significant social revolution they are causing. These tools took off without revenue models and it's now that business owners are seeing the traffic tick up and are trying to capitalize on that audience....which typically turns them into creative networks of dogshit (Myspace).
Maybe Facebook has "jumped the shark" but something else will replace it. Twitter? how about Social RSS networks?
The popularity of Myspace and Facebook have only opened the eyes of the developers of Apple (the app store has become a social significance), Google (SaaS, cloud computing applications shared socially), Microsoft (Sharepoint intranets, wikis and blogs), and IBM in the game are all helping to evolve these services into usable business applications for collaboration and expediting business practice.
Believe it or not, your Amazon store is the direct result of social networking. It's a virtual representation of you, an online business and a profit maker. All your positive feedback from "customers" has contributed to your perceived value in the market place (at one point it was whom had the most friends, now it's who has the most 5 star reviews is whom I will buy my $1 book/CD from).
Once these networks are built they are ripe for distributing content and services. How else can a no name model get her own MTV show without Myspace popularity (Tila Tequila) and now thousands of people buy her CD and watch her skanky ass on tv.
Yes. Watching someone in person flinch at your ridiculous sales proposal is much better than silence over the phone, but web, P2P, and video conferencing via these networks will be changing this...
Who needs to travel to 3 meetings in one day when I can have a video conference with 40 prospects around the globe that watch and listen to my pitch in one hour?
just like your beta max and laser disk predictions, this too will go down as a blunder as well.
I still think Facebook is a fad, and gay. And no one's figured how to make a dime off of it yet. Thanks for reading and commenting!
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