Seen on Forbes.com : less than 140 character highlighted blue area with small blue bird.
To place this “innovation” in perspective: It empowers he reader of the marketing article, which itself was “contributed” to Forbes, to lazily click in order to promote the soundbite to their social media feed. The sole purpose and dual benefactors of this “innovation” is Forbes.com and marketing the “book” authored by the sound bite “contributor”.
Applying some convoluted sense of ownership, social media users are convinced they own their social media account.
This sense of proprietary operation allows the victims to interact openly with “their” accounts and, among other perceptions, also assume that whatever they post on their feeds would be perceived as part of themselves. Should they distribute populist diatribe or intelligent remarks “the earth is round!” other people “following” them, would assume that they are in fact ‘knowledgeable’, ‘cool’, ‘great’, ‘intelligent’, ‘caring’ or ‘good’.
Social media is not about communication as much as it is about self promotion. It is about how you are perceived and to a much lesser degree to reflect how you perceive the world. It does not serve to identify or even classify your entire frame of reference as much as it allows you to put forward your view of yourself. Even whether you “like” your next door cat is calculated to curry favor with next door.
Social media users become caught up in the value of self perception and their false sense of ownership drives the expansion of narcissistic dreams which are perceived as reality.
Social media has succeeded in skewing the perspective of society.
The real question is how long will it take for the perspective to come into focus?
Will social media suddenly die in a day or less? Will it take a decade or two? Maybe a year? All things being equal, social media should fade slowly into oblivion or maybe some platforms will evolve the already increased communicative slant. Either way, social media, as it exists now, will eventually die, it is only a question of when.