“Social media? It’s all bullshit. What’s wrong with real contact.” I read this on the website of a national newspaper. A woman named Jans posted this message under an article about Social Media and language development. It makes me smile. Why? Because Jans shows her displeasure about social media via… social media.
“People seek contact with real people.” She didn’t say it, but I think that’s what Jans meant. She’s right. Without contact with other people, we would wither away. Jans is mistaken if she thinks that social media is nonsense and a form of false contact. She herself is an example of that. In the digital newspaper, she posted her opinion about an article that caught her interest. With the intention of triggering something in me and in others. And as you can see, she succeeded.
Whether we like it or not, social media has become deeply rooted in our daily lives. The world of digital contact and the 'real' world are intertwined. "You seem like a nice woman. Coffee?" I can place under her message. I quickly create a hotmail account. For a while, to exchange phone numbers. If Jans and I want to, we can be sitting behind a cappuccino together in less than half a day.
Innovations are happening at a rapid pace, and we know that. The price we pay is that, unlike the young generation of digital dependents with VR glasses, there are also stragglers. Men and women who do not want to know anything about a debit card, they exist. It is their own choice, and we respect that. But how displaced must they feel? Their backlog is almost impossible to catch up on. There are also people who do not understand Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp, Snapchat and Facebook Live.
The words 'cloud' and 'application' mean nothing to them. Is that bad? Not at all. But believe me, it doesn't stop there. Already in 2012, the use of applications, or 'apps' for short, started to increase by 85 percent. Strangely enough, that will make our lives easier. That is, if you join in.