The First Law of Social Networking

There’s an alarming trend racing around the Internet.

Actually, scrap that, this isn’t a trend. It’s been going on for a while and it needs to stop. It’s the fundamental flaw of social networks, human curiosity and gullibility, it is the Patient Zero of panic, hysteria and misinformation.

It is the breaching of the First Law of Social Networks.

Disclaimer: I’m not sure if there is an official set of laws regarding social networks, however, as far as Nate-Radio is concerned, this one needs more publicity.

The Law goes as follows:

Research before you Repost.

And it is a simple premise. It takes five minutes and it saves a lot of bad e-Chinese-whisper-like embarrassment. Here’s how you do it in five simple steps.

1.     Select the text of the article you are about to repost.

2.     Copy (Ctrl + C) the text.

3.     Open a new tab (Ctrl + T) and go to http://ww.google.com/

4.     Paste (Ctrl + V)

5.     Hit your Enter/Return button and browse the first page for the most legitimate looking site.

There are dozens of e-myth busting sites out there, snopes.com are reliable, it will take you literally ten seconds to find out if Ebola causes Zombies, Germans found definitive proof of the afterlife, You can lose fat by eating this one weird ingredient and every other outlandish idea that pops up in your feed. If you cannot find any subject hits for the main headline, try Googling the source of the article. Satire news-sites like The Onion and Viral Update make bank because people are unaware that every story they post is fake. A quick search of their website name will usually let you know if they’re legitimate news-sites or fakes.

Once you have confirmed your story is accurate (and only then) you are free to share, repost, retweet or do whatever it is your chosen network does to repost information. Up until then, don’t. Just don’t.

Please don’t.

Hashtags on Facebook

Recently, I have noticed a trend of people ending their status updates with hashtags and I can't help but feel a little sorry for them. More on that later though, first, lets address exactly what a hashtag is.

The hashtag, is simply  a hash symbol (#) followed by a word or phrase combined without spaces or, in some cases, separated by full stops (e.g. #yolo, #iamswaggy, #hashtagging.is.hip). Hashtags were initially used in Internet Relay Chat as a way to categorize phrases for ease of use later when searching for that particular phrase.

The hashtag made its way to Twitter as a simple hack to group together posts under one phrase or topic until company heads noticed it catching on and wrote a nifty little software script that would recognize any time someone tweeted a phrase starting with a “#” and turn it into a link that would direct whoever clicked on it to  every other post out there containing that same hashtag. Suddenly, if you were #havingagreattime, you could click on your own hashtag link to see who else in the world was also #havingagreattime.

At its most basic level, a hashtag is simply a search- a label for a topic or a filter for a discussion.

Twitter isn’t the only site that uses hashtags though, additionally, hashtags are functional on YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Google+ as well as few other lesser known social websites.

You know who doesn’t use hashtags? Facebook.

And that is exactly where my sympathy for the poor souls hashtagging on Facebook lies. The poor folks who don’t understand what they are doing or why they are doing it. The poor kids that think it looks cool to fail at technology. It’s like watching your parents type “h-t-t-p-:-/-/-w-w-w-.” before every url. Watching the technologically challenged try to post status updates from their email. Listening to hipsters complain why they can’t have a profile song on their instagram account.

Basically, it represents a failure to understand technology- which wouldn’t be so bad if it was kept private, but the fact that these people are broadcasting their ignorance to everyone online….

...Well, that makes me sad.

Tweet, Tweet

Ninety five percent of people who start blogs quickly forget about them.

Now, I made that percentage up, but I don't think it would be too far fetched to assume it is somewhat accurate. I imagine (with my magical imagination ball) that this is true because of three reasons.

i) Blogging takes effort.
ii) Blogging takes time.
iii) Blogging requires some form of consistency.

Now, these three things, when you combine them, become quite the Goliath. Large and looming and seemingly unbeatable. So what do people do? Well, to stick with my biblical metaphor, people take it out David style- with a small stone.



Cue Micro-Blogging. One or two sentences, straight to the point and requiring little (if any) eloquence. Enter stage left sites like Twitter that basically allow everyone to feel like they are contributing, which in truth they are- if only in bite sized serves- and thus please the masses of attention starved people.

Is this really a good thing though? Or are we going to end up living in a world where everyone is too busy expressing their ideas to read the ideas of those around them?