approach to communication

Dear Baym,

Your approach to talking about communities online is confusing to me and my experience. From what I gathered from your overall main point of view, you think that people are equally or even more social on digital media. By the term people I mean, teens and young adults.

Since the wide spread of social media, this generation is now looking for entertainment and not information.
You say that "some evidence suggests that people who use digital media may be more likely to be politically engaged offline than those who do not." The way this is worded seems faulty, some evidence, what evidence? and more likely?

The only recent instance that I can truly say that young adults are politically engaged thanks to media, specially social media, has been in the recent protests in Egypt and Turkey and Tunisia. Perhaps also in the occupy wall street protests, but in these protests i know for a fact that a lot of people are unaware of the main point of the protest and the reason from which it began.


Also i feel that although we are so connected through email and social media we are actually more far apart than ever before. You mention that because people are now more connected to their neighbors and friends and families they are now ever more social with them. I again have to disagree. I think now that we have all the people we are friends with, family of, neighbors with , or have ever met in life in one convenient place, ie. Facebook, it makes it that much easier to be less social. because they are there all you really have to say to them is the occasional hello and happy birthday we are no longer given the responsibility of actually putting work into these relationships to maintain them because we have everyone housed in Facebook. What I find is that people ultimately talk less to their family, friends, etc., and more about themselves.

I do think that overall we are using the digital media and tools for the wrong purposes and we could do great things that could be beneficial to everybody but we are stubborn.

So perhaps I misunderstood your point of communities and the digital world, but comparing what I read to what my personal experiences for the most part I disagree.  

Sincerely,

MDO

So perhaps I misunderstood your point of communities and the digital world, but comparing what I read to what my personal experiences for the most part I disagree.