Cultural Implications of Twitter

I'm absorbed in the whole social networking scene: blogging, facebooking, twittering... My life is pretty much out there and through the above, I'm able to stay pretty well connected at a surface level with the world around me. My friend Jason Shinn summed it up well, and I quote him often with this: "Do we really need more ways to say nothing?" There's goodness associated with putting my life out there, but really, isn't it kind of self-absorbed?


This article entitled Twitter - What's it doing to us? talks about how self-absorbed we (me) have become and the implications of all of this information flying us constantly:

There's also some fairly disturbing indications that this growing self-absorption may be dulling our society's conscience. Researchers at the National Academy of Sciences have found that the lightning pace of media brought on by Facebook feeds and Twitter has made the average person increasingly indifferent to human suffering. Constant updates give us little time to reflect upon the information we're receiving. The study found that humans have the capacity to sort information very quickly, but complex reactions like compassion or admiration take much longer to process. When we're constantly inundated with tiny bits of information, we rarely take time to think or feel deeply about it.