This weeks lesson has been virtual worlds. These worlds allow users to create connections with users who they may have never meet and users who create a new identity for themselves. When stumbling around on my virtual world, I began to draw connections to my new standard social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. While I know the majority of my Facebook friends in real life, I follow plenty of Twitter handles of people I have never (and properly never will). Some of the handles like @drunkhulk are of imaginary characters. While celebrities tweet in character and are only a few shades away from being imaginary.

Twitter encourages interactions not only person to person but person to institution or president to people. These interactions couldn’t happen outside of the sphere of social media. This impossibility creates it’s own virtual world, where peasants can talk to kings and people can masquerade under a different twitter handle. I was recently messaged by @stealthmountian who has over 267,000 tweets to their name. All of which are correcting others for incorrectly spelling “sneak peak”. This might not be my ideal way to spend my free time but, I can appreciate that twitter provides a platform for doing so.

This isn’t to say that Twitter can’t create severe real world consequences. Tech blogger Adria Richards, made international headlines today  when she was fired for posting a photo of two men on Twitter who she claimed were making sexist remarks. It appears we can be anyone we wish on Twitter. Even the subject of international media attention.

There were a few summers in life where I spent hours and hours on Google Reader. Sites that I would once have glanced at in passing I now read every single article their staff put out. As I was browsing reviews of food carts in Baltimore I would wonder,  why am I wasting time with this? I’m going to be honest. A large reason I was reading all of those articles was kill time but the other reasons where that Google Reader must have tapped into some OCD of mine. I had to stay up to date, keeping my head above water in the information flood which was my blog aggregation. I haven’t thought about Google Reader in quite a few years. The latest announcement surprised me, not that the reader was ending but that I still had loyal fan. Who uses aggregating tools anymore? Then I realized that one billions of us. It’s called Facebook.

A few years ago Google Plus tried to create it’s own social network were you could divided up your social groups into circles. Family, high school friends and co-workers would all be separated into different circles. It turns out that very few of us wanted to make the switch. Sure we might have our Grandmother see the same posts as our best-friends but who can take all that time to switch over contacts. Why force people into categorical relationships when Facebook does such a great job of aggregating them all into one long news feed.

I find aggregation tools fascinating because they create a even playing ground which isn’t found in the real world. They place an amateur review of a movie about a piece about international relations by the New York Times. Facebook lets me know what my sister is doing as well as the guy who sat in my high school chem class ten years ago.

Reading is perhaps one of the few activities that are truly antisocial. You sit alone, absorbed into a different place. Sure, you can share your impressions of this place with others but the fact remains that when you are there, you’re alone.

I recently signed up for the social networking site “Goodreads” before this I had been writing down the books I have read in a journal. I know… so analog. When I finished this most recent book I was gave it my traditional mark (between one and ten) and then I logged onto Goodreads to assign a similar score to the novel online.Once I got to the profile page of this book I started reading others reviews as well as looking at the profile of the author herself. The author turns out to be from my hometown. I go from site to site until I end up on her personal blog. I enjoy reading her rants and observations and in the end, I feel like we could be friends. I discover that my opinion of her book, which was originally lukewarm has been adapted by learning about her as a person. I grew to identify with this name on a cover. I rated the book much higher online than I did in my own journal.

Social media has the power to connect strangers. To unite us with celebrities in ways we never could before. The question I have about social media is why do studies continue to reveal that humans feel lonelier after the rise social media than they have before? I imagine it’s because the connections it creates are superficial and fleeting rather the personal and lasting. I don’t really know that author. I might have some shared memories of places but we’ve never had a conversation. In fact she doesn’t even know I exist. She is to me another character to read about. I know she exists independently of me but the connection can still be bridged with a couple of clicks.

Social media can help us connect on a superficial level after all, the book wasn’t that good anyway.