Is Anti-Social Media On the Rise?
May 8th, 2014 by
This year will make a decade since Facebook was launched and social media usage has skyrocketed, but is social media turning us anti-social? Parents who were unhappy about their children’s texting habits in the early 2000’s would be appalled by today’s society of Instagraming, Tweeting, FourSquaring and Pinteresting fiends across all age ranges. However, the pendulum may have swung too far, and it seems that parents aren’t the only group fed up with obsessive social media behavior.
There are many signs that we are entering an age of ANTI-social media.
Many corporations and industry leaders have voiced their advocacy for more human interaction through traditional media. Coca-Cola invented the Social Media Guard in the sarcastic commercial pictured above, which blocks people from the ability to see their phones.
Dentyne used print and commercials to encourage more “face time” by comparing human interaction with social media actions in an ad.
Professionals working within the social media industry may even capitalize off of the anti-social tendencies of those who are active online. Here are a couple of examples of how.
Cloak
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and FourSquare aid this new mobile application in locating where you are. Cloak asks you to login to one of your social media accounts, which pinpoints where you are on a map, along with the locations of other friends who are also logged into Cloak.
The app is advertised as a way to avoid people that you do not want to run into. You can set alerts that warn you when certain users come into a selected radius of you. Couldn’t this also be used as a way to stalk people? Guess that wasn’t a catchy advertising pitch…
Self Control
This app allows you to choose time periods when you do not want the ability to access specified apps or programs at all. This could be used to stop yourself from checking your email, playing games, checking Facebook, etc. A screenshot of the app is below, followed by their honest answer on how to stop the app when it is activated. The interest in this app shows that people want to be detached from their online world every once in a while but might need a little help to disconnect.
This discussion will continue on for years, but has social media gone too far? Check out the signs.
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