What is it today with all these Web 2.0 novelties? The world is going crazy. Think a couple of years back, when there was no Facebook, or Twitter, or Tuenti, or LinkedIn. What did we do? Right - we went out and met our friends, or called them up on the phone. And those were real friends. I am looking at my friends count on Facebook, which is already over 400 and I am thinking - are they real friends or some type of cyber-perversion of reality and they don't exist in real life?
You are somehow forced into that vertigo of social networks and the institutions you belong to force you, either implicitly (you are missing out of events or you might find everyone talking about something you have no idea about because you are not privy to that particular Facebook group) or explicitly, like this announcement for all IE students/professors/affiliates to join whatever social networks available:
http://alumninews.blogs.ie.edu/2010/05/ie-alumni-social-media-2.html.
LinkedIn has integrated the TypePad application, which reposts your blogs onto the home LinkedIn page, so that you can see your connections' new blogs posts when you sign in. Information is being spread so rapidly that it feels like it a virus. I start thinking whether the value of the information itself then gets eroded. What's the point of possessing a piece of information if it is shared with the whole world and therefore no longer can be used as your competitive advantage. I am going off on a tangent here and maybe it is worthwhile to talk about differences between information as "stuff" and information as "ideas" and their respective weight. Still, coming back to the topic of this post, why does information gets spread so rapidly across the network?
Let's make an experiment - watch the following video and tell me (honestly!): would you want to forward it onto your friends?
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