It's quite ironic how my reasons for signing up to write an article at Hacker Noon was to purge the frustrations caused by social networks of the day. What happens to be the first thing asked of me as a new member? It is to edit my profile, and add my social media links: Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook etc.
The Problems with Social Media
It's perfectly reasonable to expect a rising network to leverage from other people's networks, politicians do it, businesses do it, we all do it.
But what happens to those individuals who due to the randomness of the world we live in happen to be outside those networks. Are the networks omnipresent to the point that the real isn't as important as the perceived?
Say for a multitude of reasons, someone decides to be a contrarian to a rising trend, let's suppose it's a new tech platform he or she happens to hear about called Linkedin. Can the social & professional implications that result from such contrarian behavior just be written off as collateral damage for an otherwise well oiled social network that helps b2b advertising?
The more daunting question is what happens in the future?
Who can imagine a world where a child grows up and refuses to sign up for Facebook, Youtube or Linkedin? Will he or she be ostracised into conformity or is their an end in sight to this technological follower fetishism?