Debate: social media – friend or foe?

This week, The Student and The Intern went to a digital technology workshop run by Crossover Labs in London, where an interesting discussion was had about the impact of digital technology on society. In Wannabe Hacks’ first debate post, the two go head-to-head about the pros and cons of social media:

AGAINST: The Student

The problem of social media, from my point of view, has been neatly summed up in the past hour. A whole 60 minutes ago I sat down to write this blog post, only to satisfy my technological nervous tick by checking Twitter. This led to me read several articles linked by people on my feed, visit numerous websites and to generally tweet a bit myself. All the while, said blog post remains unwritten.

Social media (I can only claim to properly use Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, WordPress and occasionally StumbleUpon on a regular basis) is the most productive way of being unproductive. Even when you think you’re doing something useful, chances are you are, in fact, not doing something else more pressing. I do it myself all the time.