The General Intellect

“Do you Facebook? Do you Twitter?” That is not a question that I would have prepared for when interviewing for a job just a couple of years back. However, as we all know, things are changing so fast that we barely have time to catch up, and that may be an understatement. Everywhere you turn all you hear these days is Facebook here, Facebook there, or Twitter here, Twitter there and so on…. It is in our personal lives, jobs, political campaigns and religious gatherings. I remember my mother saying that the priest at her local church interrupted a sermon to answer a call and say to the caller that he was busy. The amazing thing was that the young priest put the phone on vibrate, and she said that they could hear the humming until an assistant removed it despite of the priest’s frowning. The president credits some of his success to Twitter, Facebook and texting.

I wonder, how is all this new technology helping the job market? Some are quick to say, well, you can network easier to find out about openings, look them up, and to forward your resume. There is no question that all that is great, but are their jobs being created? I don’t think so, but that is just my opinion. There have been many articles on the issue of how great social media can help those looking for a job, and also that we all have to include  social media skills in our resume for better employment opportunities. But I ask again, where are the Jobs?

The way I see it, is that there are many more advantages for the corporations to benefit from social media, as they use the employee’s social networks to promote their brands. It is a brand new and complicated issue that will take some time to evaluate where it is going or how it will help the average worker. Where do we draw the line when it comes to our personal and our professional lives? How far corporations  will go to promote, introduce and sneak their brands into our social networks? Do you want this new great application?.. Hmmm, if so, we need the keys to your life and those in it. These days our relatives and friends are being nicely packaged and sold to the best bidder.

The social Media corporations are thriving; their growth has been impressive, considering our crumbling economy. It’s all over the news, record profits for the big corporations, paralleling the social media giant’s growth… is there a connection here? Or is it just the product of my sociology courses gone wild?

The Times magazine has an interesting article  written by Zackary Karabel and in it,  it says: “Billions of dollars in investment capital are being spent on these ventures, and if we are to have a productive future economy, that capital needs to grow the economic pie — and not just among the elite of Silicon Valley and Wall Street.” Times magazine. So, here we are, busy polishing our social network skills to spread the corporate gospel to our friends and families.

Technology has shaped our society since the beginning of time, and it will take some pain to get adjusted to the new wave of communication advances. The new wave of social media industries are definitely not creating proportional employee demands as it is expected for their earnings and growth, so there is something wrong here that we must look into. The relationship between corporations and consumers is being shaped thorough a new social media rage to the disadvantage of the American worker, increasing the huge gap between the “haves” and the “have not”.

I believe that is a recipe for social disorder, where ironically, social media may just come to the rescue.

http://www.dermundo.com/www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2062464,00.html

It has come to my attention that the internet is taking a step into the workforce. The overall appearance of your cubicle is known to have four wall barrier that contains a desk and chair. You are forced to use the space you have to personalize it as you see fit but you are never private because these barrier are about four feet in height. Your workspace is completely open for the eye to see. Now there is a recent trend when you enter some offices these barriers no longer exist and your work area is completely public to everyone that enters the room. Mangers are the only personnel with privacy because they are enclosed in an office with a door for extra privacy. Ever wonder why this is so?

To me it reminds me of a face book profile where your desk is considered to be your wall….. you do not have the option of a privacy setting. Its so weird to me that anyone would think of the idea to remove the only source of some privacy in the workplace. This just shows how much of your life is not private anymore how much everyone wants to peer in once in a while to see what you are up to. The internet has definitely established a way to show people that putting their private life on surveillance twenty four seven is not that bad and can be beneficial to some people (employers).
T
he video I uploaded spoke about all the aspects that is beneficial to the workplace but did they take into consideration the employee privacy.

In this article  here they are criticizing the negative effects that social networking is having on our generation which is the cause of more isolating in our generation. I do agree that because of the development of social networking, it has lead to less real human interactions because we all communicate through social networking. Even when we don’t communicate through social networking, nobody likes to talk on the phone much anymore so you will see that it is more common for people to be more into texting each other instead of picking up the phone and calling someone which is the authors point that there is more cyber communication and less real human interactions between us.

I believe that social networking hurts the kids who are in elementary school and Junior High School more than it does those who are in their 20’s. The reason I believe this is because they are missing out on the life of a kid and don’t go out and hang out with their friends as much because they are more concerned with being on Facebook on their computer. So in a way they are leaving in more of a cyber world than any other generation because they are all texting or participating on social networking such as twitter.

I actually think social network does more good than harm for our society today. It’s just another form of communicating and it actually means that you are communicating with more people than you were before. Before the development of social networking, we pretty much only got the opportunity to communicate with those people in our phone book but now we are able to communicate with people we have not seen in 10 years. I think that those people who are so critical of social networking just have not accepted the fact that this is a new form of communicating worldwide and are still not used to it.

This being my last blog, I wanted to discuss a service that acknowledges the growing internet dependency and social media usage. This article lists the best times to Tweet for you to get the most exposure. The website is basically an advertisement for a service called Garious which is a Tweet scheduler for professionals to market themselves and their businesses. Garious argues that Tweeting at 9 a.m. gets the most exposure because “you can target people coming to work in America and Canada’s West Coast, you can tweet to tweeple at lunch time in the East Coast, and you can have your tweets reach as far as London where  Britons are calling it the end of another work day”. I, myself, do not have a Twitter account to test this out, but the article’s claim seems valid.

This started out as a useful social media tool for businesses to get their name out there, but this other Garious advertisement offers their services to social media addicts who feel that they need help with managing their time. It seems a little ironic that these internet addicts are using another online resource to control their social media obsession. Garious offers their services to “pre-schedule your tweets and other social media activities”. It seems that the future of some online services will be, strangely, along the lines of trying to curb internet addiction. In a way, Garious is a useful tool for those who spend a majority of their time marketing their business online, but could possibly be used by internet addicts who want to manage their time better by planning social media activity beforehand.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/if-youth-can-post-its-facebook-status-age-can-too/?ref=facebookinc

While looking through the NY times I found this interesting article about how the older generation is trying to keep up with the younger generation. But from reading this article and to no surprise to me, the older generation purpose of getting involved with Facebook is to keep tabs on their children to make sure they are not engaging in any illegal activities or doing anything that they would not want them to do. There are a number of reasons why older people decide to joined Facebook. Some as I mentioned before joined to keep tabs on their children but there are others who joined to surprise their children or grandchildren in a good way to show that they are keeping up with our generation.

This link is interested because it is showing that even the older generation who probably five years ago could never see themselves getting involved into a social network website but now more and more people in their 50’s and 60’s are signing up for Facebook. They are even going as far as to going to classes to learn the basic in and out of social network website. When I see something like this taking place it just makes me think that just maybe after hearing about how great Facebook is for the last 5 or 6 years that you just end up succumbing to the temptation and decide to make a Facebook page just to see what is all the excitement with Facebook is about. I thin all of us is like this with something in our life. If you continue to hear everybody talk about how great something is, you are going to want to test it out at some point and that is what is taking place with the older adults and Facebook.

In this article written by Jenna Wortham, she is exploring the idea of the fear of missing out and how it affects us now. Are we so dependent these days that all of us who are in the social network world actually undergoes the fear of missing out issue? Do those of us who are addicted to our Facebook and twitter pages feel that if we don’t log on to our homepage for several days that we are going to be missing out on the social world and about what is taking place in our friends or followers life? I think that this much easier said than done because of all of the technology in the world today. Maybe if smartphones did not have applications on our phones for Facebook and Twitter, this would be much easier to do, but now that we are always checking our Facebook on our cell phones, I think that it is much easier to get caught up in the fear of missing out world. We always want to see what new statuses friends posted on their wall, and to see if they added any new interesting pictures for our viewing pleasure.

Maybe we are just too addicted to the social media world and always need to be in touch with that world. Jenna Wortham suggested ideas that we can do to address this situation such as hiding your phone, limiting time on social networks on the weekend, and finally to put your cell phone on silent for long periods of time. I for one actually currently do put my phone on silent and keep it far from me for several hours during my day to avoid seeing my phone blinking because I have a facebook notification or something.

How do you handle the FOMO?