Using social media allows you to connect with a diverse, near unlimited audience, and in a fun and interactive way. But when you’re tweeting away on your iPhone, whilst listening to music that’s scrobbling to your Last.fm and viewing a friend’s photo album on Facebook all at once, how much of the media you’re consuming are you actually taking in? When is it less about effective communication and more a matter of too much white noise and no signal?
Research carried out at Stanford University has found that savvy media consumers who delight in multi-tasking – including users of popular social media – are in fact unproductive and tend to turn out tasks of low quality. They have difficulty filtering out irrelevant information, have a poor working memory, and are slow to switch from one activity to another. In such cases, it seems that social media is a distraction rather than an aid to successful communication.
Moreover, when social media is used with no real purpose, it may be in danger of becoming something close to ridiculous. Tweeting Too Hard takes the Twitter phenomenon and dredges up the most useless, banal and pretentious ‘tweets’ from all over. It’s an amusing pastime in itself, but it also reminds us of how content on social media platforms can become meaningless, alienating users with the overflow of information.
As producers, we at The Screens are well aware of the many advantages and occasional disadvantages of social media for our clients. Given its ease of use, accessibility and widespread nature, social media is an exciting way to reach out to and engage an audience. However, we also like to keep in mind that internet popularity can be easy to achieve but short-lived. Creating an interesting and well established media solution, however, can have an enduring and memorable effect.
