This week an interesting juxtaposition happened for me between class work and my outside reading. I have been working my way through a pair of books that both explore human capabilities and roles in the current era, as they relate to each other, machines, society, and the world. The books are Range: Why generalists triumph in a specialized world, by David Epstein and Thank you for being late: An optimist’s guide to thriving in the age of acceleration, by Thomas Friedman. Both are written from a more optimistic point of view than many other current releases, and both gave me some different approaches to thinking about social media and its impact, among many other topics. Plenty has been written about the negative aspects of connectivity and social media, and many good points have been made regarding addictiveness and resource waste, destruction of focus, anxiety caused by comparison with others’ curated lives, and lack of real connection between people. My current reads highlight some of the more positive effects that can also come about in the current world of connection. In Chapter 5 of his book, Friedman talks about some of the ways in which easy and fast communication is changing the world. His examples include the fact that when he wrote the book, 914 million people had at least one international connection on social media and at least 50 percent of Facebook users had at least one international friend. (Friedman, 2016) I will readily agree that many of these “friends” may not be close, but they do at least give us some more access to outside viewpoints. Through Facebook, I get to maintain some level of contact with cousins in Norway, in addition to friends in England and Peru. There is almost no chance I would stay in any form of contact with these people without social media, but with the connections, when they come to town (or the country) for a visit, we may choose to meet up and continue our social ties in person. Friedman also devotes a fair bit of space to a discussion on ways that internet and social media offer people in developing countries better access to education, new philosophies, and a new audience for their thoughts and problem-solving ideas. David Epstein’s book is largely about the benefits inherent in approaching learning and problem-solving from disparate angles and disciplines in order to arrive at novel solutions. In chapter 8, he highlights some crowdsourcing programs including Innocentive and Kaggle that pose questions on the internet, and ask for solutions. These solutions usually come from a wide range of areas of expertise, and typically arise from well outside the expected backgrounds. These programs work by giving a large number of people access and a sense of community to work on problems together, learning from each other, and making contributions within a specific context. These are a little beyond the typical realm of the social media landscape that most of us inhabit, but they are another form of personal learning network and social interaction across large gaps in distance and time. As Paul Miller pointed out in the video and article, while these tools can easily drive wedges between people and interfere with in-person contact, they can also be invaluable for organizing more contact between people and better communication, if we choose to use them in that way.
Epstein, D. (2019) Range: Why generalists triumph in a specialized world. New York, NY: Riverhead Books.
Friedman, T. L. (2016) Thank you for being late: An optimist’s guide to thriving in the age of accelerations. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Miller, P. (2013, May) I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet. The Verge. Retrieved from: https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/1/4279674/im-still-here-back-online-after-a-year-without-the-internet.
Miller, P. (2013, September 13)A year offline, what I have learned. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=30&v=trVzyG4zFMU.