On a drawing book, Internet could be described as the flower of knowledge exploration, a place to explore mankind’s knowledge virtually, and contributing to that. What a useful contribution to our lives! However, our Internet is a lot less boring. After merely 36 years of development, Internet became the quick-fix for boredom at the office. Forget about knowledge, who doesn’t want to see a cute kitty or discuss breakup words to end your relationship?
In my opinion, there has been an staggering trend going on with the social media sites. While Slashdot is still (and probably always will be) moving along with it’s core crowd discussing tech, Digg grew from being a tech site, to… a tech site – adding images of cute little kitties and latest Failblog in the process. For quite some time, Twitter has been THE place to discuss, well… Twitter, a topic that merely expanded to ‘fail wales’ along the way. More recently, interesting contributions came along, which made the platform interesting, but in the post-Oprah Twitter-era, the network seems to have evolved to a place to discuss “lies girls tell” and “breakup words”.
Perhaps this observation is just me, but doesn’t it suck that these social networks are being ridiculed to pointless time wasters? Don’t even get me started on Facebooks “quiz” revolution (have you noticed that), or the amazing amount of useless content that Yahoo Answers is producing. I wonder if social networks lose a lot of their value due to deteriorating content that is published on them. Social Networks should (and Digg failed in this) facilitate new ways to present their data to their audience to keep the network interesting, otherwise, it is doomed to lose their audience on the long run.
Let me draw up the ‘evolution of topics’ for you, as I have experienced it:
