i read a post by kami over communications overtones where she discusses the social media “cultists”. i agree with her for the most part, as post echoes one of mine from the week earlier (great minds).

that is, until i got to the end of the post:

While the web world is indeed influential, it is not an accurate representation of the real world.

this is where our views diverge, for many people there is no distinction between the online world and the ‘real’ world. online communities are human communities. the dynamics may be different and people may behave differently to how they would behave in the ‘real’ world but they still behave like people. just a facet of themselves. i’ll give you an example, a normal person “joe blogs” would behave very differently in a room full of clients than he would in a room full of family right?

online is real. the dynamics are yet to be understood, but they are real. real enough that people kill themselves due to actions of others online and real enough to fall in love.

the distinction between the two is rapidly blurring and some suggest that digital natives really don’t see much of a difference between the two.

having read both of our posts though, i am seeing a bias in both of us as communicators (kami far more experienced than myself) that we see social media as a medium. i wonder if in ten years time, there will be any distiniction between online and offline.

opinion cultist, huyse, jihadist, kami, social media