Khaya Dlanga’s life on the “internets”. All on one blog.

I like Redi Direko and I respect her highly but boy is she wrong. In a column she penned today in the Sowetan she makes a number assertions about Facebook that are of course, in my arrogant opinion, completely ill-informed. I use the word ill-informed because she has been rather matter-of-fact about something she is not a part of – as if she understands it as someone who is in fact part of it. I’m not saying that one can’t have an informed opinion about a subject simply because one doesn’t participate in it. All I am saying is that a person who is in it is far more informed than an observer. If she had been on Facebook for a while and then decided to delete her profile, she would have arrived at a different conclusion than the one she has arrived at. There are nuances that an observer will miss because that’s all they do, observe.

Having said that, I prefer Twitter to Facebook even though I am on both platforms. What Redi fails to understand is that social media has in fact confounded those experts who believed that there would be less human interaction because of the explosion of social media. On the contrary, it has in fact increased it. I’m not talking about the obvious use of it as an information tool. It is used as a tool for the like-minded to meet up and for friends to gather. According to research people interact more with one another because of social media, not less.

I know more about my friends than I did, I am more connected to them than ever before. I meet with them on a much more frequent basis than before. If anything, this new tool strengthens and tests friendships.

Every time some new technology makes it’s way we get told by naysayers about the dangers of this new medium. When computers started making headway into the business world, paper manufactures worried that less paper would be used, meaning they’d make less money, the opposite happened -we use more paper. There were even suggestions that they would reduce working hours and therefore result in fewer workers, once again the opposite happened, we saw an increase in the number of workers, instead of cutting down number of workers, more workers were created because of the computer.

Technology has surprisingly connected us and made us more human, not less. #asyouwere