Social Networking Stunts Your Growth …

“most of us need some sort of reasonably compelling and ongoing purpose to want to use the key socializing features of a social networking platform for more than a few weeks or months.”
I think the success of sites like facebook and myspace, as well as television, can be explained for a large part exactly because of the lack of a “reasonably compelling and ongoing purpose” for lots of people in their real life.
For someone doing interesting work like you, this won’t be much of an issue I think. Myspace, Facebook and television will exist until people find something better to do.
What’s your goal in life?

Compare with Shirky’s recent talk on the cognitive surplus:
http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

Thanks for the tip. Good article.

Yes .. thanks to Meryn for that article. I’ve read it several times and blogged about it in several other blog posts, here and on a couple of other blogs.

And yes, meryn, I think you are right about many people not having much or any purpose in their lives. The last 25 years or so (I guess a too-be-expected extension of all that has come before) has seen the deepening and widening of the impact of corporations, of marketing, of helping to turn us into consumers doing work we don’t care about or actively dislike .. to pay the bills, to just keep on keepin’ on.

Yes, you’re right … it seems attratctive sometimes to entertain ourselves to death (the title of a book by Neil Postman).