Social media hasn't changed our capacity for social interaction

The TEDBlog caught up with physician and social scientist Nicholas Christakis. Amongst much else, he has this to say about social interaction online and how it relates to face-to-face interaction:

"What constrains or enables the capacity of human beings to work in groups is not so much the technology, but rather the capacity of the human brain to have and monitor social interactions. So you can make interactions between different pairs of people more efficient, and there’s no doubt modern technologies have done that, but what really limits our abilities to interact with each other and to influence each other is a more fundamental requirement. Social media and the Internet haven’t changed our capacity for social interaction any more than the Internet has changed our ability to be in love or our basic propensity to violence, because those are such fundamental human attributes.

In fact, James and I have looked at the phenomenon of Facebook friends -- and here the word “friends” is weird, we should probably say “acquaintance.” We use the word “friends” but it doesn’t mean they’re really your friends. If a random Facebook acquaintance of yours expresses interest in a movie or a book or music, it doesn’t modify your own taste in those things. But, when a real friend of yours does, among your Facebook acquaintances, you are influenced and you do change. So, these fleeting, minor online interactions may not be as influential as we think. But, online interactions can indeed facilitate an influence process among people who are actually truly connected or who have meaningful relationships with each other.

Also, the person who accumulates 10,000 followers on Twitter is unlikely to be affected by everything else that everyone else is saying -- you can’t possibly be monitoring the tweets of the other 10,000. And, if the person is sending out tweets to 10,000 or 20,000 people, in a way, all they’ve done is to become a targeted broadcaster. Now, that targeting is valuable. It’s much better to send messages to people who have expressed an interest in your message, rather than broadcasting into the air, but we should be thinking about this type of interaction more as a kind of change in the way of broadcasting rather than a change in the way of social interaction."


And here's his TED Talk (which I haven't watched yet):

http://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_christakis_the_hidden_influence_of_social_networks.html