What is the purpose of social media?
Let me begin with my initial ideas:
Social media is addicting. Apparently, activity on your wall or blog causes a reaction similar to feeling affection, which therefore causes addiction (see this). And addiction to anything isn’t terribly good (quite the contrary, I’d argue).
Social media is inherently self-promoting. This is and the previous point are similar. As men, we can easily want to be more in the opinion of others, and social media can so cause self-centeredness, which is absolutely contrary to the way God wants us to live. Trevin wax makes this point here.
Social media is time consuming. To this I’m sure we can all testify first-hand. How long do you spend blogging, tweeting, or Facebooking? And what fruits do we bear? In Trevin’s post above, he writes that he needs to “take a step back and evaluate the spiritual effects (both good and bad)” of social media. Does the time we spend justify our use of it?
I see these three points primarily as results of using social media, and I make them without regard to [social media's] actual purposes. So, what is the purpose of social media? How would you reconcile these three points with social media’s real purposes?
And specifically, how would you reconcile these three points with a blog’s purpose? Facebook’s purpose? Twitter’s purpose?
