Information Madness

Friending was not used as a verb until about five years ago. Social networks burst into the scene with this word when Friendster, MySpace and Facebook came into being. Suddenly, our friends became more than our friends. They became our audience. Blogging was made to look like shouting out into a void and posting updates on a social network became like an intimate conversation among friends at a bar, maybe. Then friends of friends started to become our friends.

These have blown to such proportions now that online friendship has started to get eroded and has been devalued. Then Twitter entered with a scenario that was less of friends and more of followers. Perhaps, these one-way relationships were easier to handle. There were no more annoying decisions about giving your ex-girlfriend access to your photos and no more fuss about who could see your employment and contact information. Twitter’s updates were also easily searchable on the net forcing the users to be thoughtful about their posts.

The intimate conversation suddenly turned into talent shows. It has now become a challenge to test your intellectual economical abilities with words in one hundred and forty characters or less. Twitter has turned its popularity into dollars with lucrative deals to allow its users’ tweets to be broadcast through search algorithms on Bing and Google.

Facebook also followed in the same way to distribute real time data to these search engines. The problem with Facebook is that majority of its users limit their updates to their friends and do not expect those updates to appear in public search results. So, Facebook had little content to provide and did not earn much.  To make up on this, they have started gathering personal data of its selected users and making it into a bundle to be sold. Facebook and Twitter are ultimately becoming no place for being intimate with friends anymore.