dustanddiamonds

Does social media increase participation in social activities IRL? - Yesterday I made an highly non scientific experiment by throwing a picnic BBQ in the park, and inviting people using different communication tools.

In the category Social media, we have Twitter, Facebook (away/present message, not creating an actual event) and the away message in G-talk. In the more old fashion category IT & Telecom  text messages, e-mail and phone calls was in use. The third category of invitations, Real Life, are those that are independent of any technology, face to face and guests brought along by friends.  

As you can see in this diagram, most of my guests were invited by me in real life ore brought by other guests. Only 1/8 had received their invitation by a social media channel. The first really sunny spring day in Sweden, people are more likely to spend their time out in the sun than indoors in front of a computer. That might have an impact on the result.

I went treasure hunting at the library, looking for some non-specific book on the topic of social media for the course I'm taking. Instead I found this book about the Internet Revolution in Sweden, and it turns out that my teacher is playing a major part of it. I haven't jet been started to reed it, but I am looking forward to do so.

Since i originaly posted this blogpost about Twitter, Facebooks new design have caused much ado, and that design in combination with the escalated speed of changing status message in email & IM clients and today I feel compleatly surrunded by tweets & pseudo tweets. 

I just begun to wonder -whats the social thing about that? Of cause it may work as an icebreaker, but face it, its about as social as printing a T-shirt : "been there, done that, wrote a tweet about it" -sounds familiar?

"I'm ideling in front of the computer, cause I have nothing else to do" would be the accurate phrase in 99% of the cases..

I have been using twitter sporadic the past weeks, at first I received error messages when registering my cellphone number, when this is working it s kind of easy to text on the go, when I'm actually doing something, it's nice! And TweetDeck, fantastic! A classmate told me it was God, and maybe thats kind of true, the one eyed god Oden in anicent nordic mythologi had two corps, Hugin & Munin who flyed across the world collecting information, and then returned and twitterd in Odens ears about what was going on in the world. I like TweetDeck, its kind of cool to play god from time to time..

This blog have existed in 3 days and six hours. So far I have done absolutely nothing to generate traffic to this site, and only one unique user has been registered. Me.
 
-Is the blog then a part of the public sphere or more of a private one before the word gets out there and people are able to find their way here? And then what? I'll believe most blogs are mainly visited by personal friends of the writer, even do they are reacheble for all of the online population. Is it the possibility of reaching out to readers more than to actually do so that makes something "public"?