I'm going to have to tweet this....

So, this whole social media thing still bugs me sometimes. People have loved to attribute incredible commendations to it when it’s played a part in movements like in Egypt, other Middle East and N. African countries. I guess if you’re in prison and you have access to a smart phone, it’d be great to let someone know you’re there to see if they can come and get you out.

To me, it seems that social media is currently having the same integrity issues that we had to deal with when the internet first came on the scene. When I started my college career, the internet didn’t exist. We had to go and sit in a mold-ridden library and page through little cards (while standing) to find the volume of a certain journal we needed and then, after searching through 50 articles, try to scrounge through our laundry coinage to find enough change to copy the pages we needed, and then walk home barefoot, uphill, through snow.

When I went through the second phase of my college career, the internet was up and running but many journals were still in the process of converting their entire libraries to online sources. The search engines were mostly adequate, but the keywords were hit and miss (at least you could sit while doing this). It didn’t take long for professors to get savvy about this and devote some substantial time to educate students on how to tell the difference between a reliable internet source and Wikipedia. You can now really get some good work done using internet sources.

Just when I get used to the idea that Satan doesn’t really live on the internet, along comes Facebook and Twitter. No, I do not want to tweet my thoughts to a news program to be recited in real time. A commentator just stated that tweets are “quick and to the point”, which is true, but many stated "facts" are unreliable, unsubstantiated, and simply untrue. Comments are posted at such a quick rate that I don’t understand how there’s time to do some fact-checking. It doesn’t take long to google a sentence and come up with what looks like a good article supporting your opinions, but how do you know that’s right? The reason why it takes so long to make scientific progress is because of the very definition of science - you have to replicate experiments to make sure the results are valid. This takes time. It should take time.

The pro of communicating strictly through electronic media is that you can hide from people. The con is that people can hide from you.

It allows me the luxury of taking on more projects because I can work on them in bits and pieces when I have time and then email results. The recipient can read them when they have time and then can respond to me when they have a moment. If that moment is 11:00pm, I would much rather get an email than a phone call. I hate the phone. Let’s not rehash that conversation.

Siri is what is really scaring me. Are we now going to ask a phone to answer questions only we can answer for ourselves? In a commercial, a guy asks Siri if he can walk to the hotel. If the man has legs and they are functional, then yes, he can walk to the hotel. Is Siri programmed to automatically know the weather conditions, the best route to the hotel, the amount of foot or automobile congestion, and then decide if this is the best option for this particular individual? I see this as a ripe opportunity for villains like Gargamel or Mojo Jojo to take over the world by instructing us to keep going straight instead of taking that left turn at Albuquerque. That might get me lost on my way to find this guy who can help me survive after the sun explodes in 2012.