Social Media: Connecting People For Better AND For Worse

Social media is a powerful and innovative way for connecting people across the world but for every person who uses these powerful tools to improve their lives, staying connected with old friends, discovering new and better products/services and promoting their own talents and businesses, there are 100 people using social media tools to disengage from the real world, procrastinate on their responsibilities and waste time consuming and producing useless information. In many ways the realm of social media can offer exciting and very unique advantages for adding value to your own and other's lives but one must also consider the not so exciting and just as unique disadvantages that come with the wide spread use of social media. The question then becomes: Do the positives outweigh the negatives?

While many social media users will attest to how wonderful all these social media tools are, just because a lot of people think something is awesome, doesn't necessarily make it valuable. In the context of societal productivity, how much value is being produced versus destroyed through social media? The answer to this is impossible to quantify but from my own experience in the realm and my observations of friends also engaging in social media, it seems to me that there is a net destruction of value. This destruction of value being in large part from time wasted by people producing and consuming useless information that could have been much better spent engaging in life in different more valuable ways.

It's clear that social media is becoming a more integral part of society each and every day but in it's current state of evolution it would be hard for me to give it any praise. My experiences lead me to believe that social media has been a burden for society, destroying more value than it creates however as it continues to evolve we are bound to reach a point where more value is created than destroyed. Once this inflection point is reached, the realm of social media will be a dominate and incredibly powerful force in shaping the progression of our society, until then though, expect social media to be a net drain on our society.