Recently, we here at Social Turbine decided that we wanted to perform a brief social media experiment. No set up, just a quick "see-what-we-can-do" on a moments notice. We wanted to see if, with almost no set up time or thought, we could get #KimmyGibbler to become a trending topic. A few tweets later, we saw a couple #KimmyGibbler's lurking around the twitterverse, but it more or less ended there.
Fast-forward a few days and a young lady I am friends with brought up Kimmy Gibbler in conversation. I missed the beginning and middle of it, but basically she was accusing Kimmy Gibbler of being one of the most annoying people on the planet. Whether or not I agree with her isn't relevant, what matters is that I assumed somehow she had absorbed the Kimmy Gibbler content through some sort of mental tweet-epathy.
Which led to an interesting thought; has the Internet become our sole information source?
You can already see it laid out pretty broadly across the spectrum. People talking over the water cooler about Charlie Sheen's latest controversial 'Tiger's blood and porn stars' tweet. While I would hesitate to include as large a swathe across culture as the following point, it seems as if many of my contemporaries are receiving the bulk of their news through Facebook feeds.
Has social media become the be all and end all of not only online connections, but also news and information intake?
It's not really as crazy as it sounds. Would as many high school students post about the revolution in Egypt if it wasn't as simple as sharing a link on Facebook or retweeting an article from CNN.Com?
It would also be entirely feasible to argue that this has streamlined the news in a way, but man, talk about partisanship. In a way, it is easy to see how those who follow the news could select the articles they found most riveting, which would be reblogged, tweeted and shared to all of their friends. Forcing the article to either gain in popularity or be un-tweeted into extinction.
Surely however, it would be easier to argue that there are simply fewer and fewer aficionados of informative resources. Further, who am I to say that this is a bad thing or this is a good thing? This is simply an observation, for something to gain traction these days; it must be online to matter to anyone at all.