Last week my fellow blogUT writer, Julia, wrote a great piece dispelling the alleged evils of social media. This week, I’m continuing that thought.

As Julia mentioned, social media has given us all the opportunity to keep in touch with our friends, reconnect with lost ones, and even share relevant (and well, sometimes not so relevant) information with each other with a simple 140 character tweet. More than anything else, Twitter and other social media tools lets us “learn about and interact with the world in real time, and in a way we never imagined”.

I’d like to take this one step further. Not only has social media given us this chance to connect with each other on a one-on-one basis, but it has also opened the way for a much more far-reaching and collective purpose. Case in point? Tweetsgiving. Never heard of it? Let me give you the low down.

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There has been a lot of fearmongering going around about the evils of social media, especially Facebook and Twitter. I recently had a conversation with a friend where she brought up pretty much all of the usual objections, and we came up with some interesting conclusions as to why social media is… not evil.

Objection #1: Social media cheapens social interaction.

No, no it doesn’t. I’ve heard this one a lot, and it always makes my blood boil. Just because I tweet back and forth with someone I haven’t seen since high school does NOT mean that I put him on the same level as my best friend. Just because I like having people write on my wall does NOT mean that I am deluded into thinking that cyber-companionship is a substitute for the real deal.

Social interaction is just that, social. Letter-writing in 19th-century England did not help make upper-class society any less fake, and its absense today will not make ours any more fake. Social media helps us reconnect with people we haven’t seen in a long time, or find out more about people we know only casually, but there is no limit to how many people we can know or be in contact with at a given time; finding out more about one person does not magically cheapen our relationship with another.

Objection #2: Social media cheapens the value of communication.

Anyone who says this clearly hasn’t read Jane Austen. Writing a ten page letter does not make everything you write meaningful. This way, at least the nonesense people write is limited to 140 characters. Plus, it means that we don’t have to wait until we have 10-pages worth of information to share with our friends. We can give them real-time updates about the things we think are important, and they can respond, in real time. Social media also means that we can connect information in unheard-of ways. Instead of telling you that my friend’s sister’s husband’s daughter’s teacher thought Aroma was a good coffee shop, I can just link you to Lori’s review.

And, just like with relationships, updating Twitter won’t stop you from writing that Nobel-prize winning novel. (more…)