http://mashable.com/2011/09/29/facebook-social-shopping/
When I think of shopping, I usually categorize it as either a chore (getting groceries or other necessities) or as a fun way to spend time with a friend, perhaps. In the past, shopping always involved leaving your house and physically going to a store or market and making a purchase or browsing merchandise. Now, with online shopping, we never have to actually enter a store to get anything. We click and in a few business days, it’s on our door step. Shopping has evolved with technology, and now shopping is about to become “social.”
Facebook’s new makeover also included potential changes to the way we will be able to shop. Not only will we not have to leave our house to shop, but now we will not have to step away from our computers to shop with a friend! With the new Facebook features, we will be able to have discussions about products we are interested in purchasing as well as have the potential to connect with others who “own” a product that we “want” through searching wish lists and other new features.
In my opinion, it seems like this was a logical next step but I don’t know if it is necessarily a good thing. We are slowly eliminating the need to actually see people at all to communicate. We can spend the day shopping with a friend without ever having to see them, speak to them or leave the home. Maybe social shopping is nice for people who live far away from friends and family and value their opinions when making purchases, but if social media continues to give us new opportunities to not communicate with people without the barrier of a screen, I think social media will make us a very antisocial society.
Even though most people are accepting it now, it seems that the big questions with the internet, mainly with our grandparents generation, are "why don't you pick up the phone?" or "when's the last time you've actually seen your friend without a screen in front of you?" Of course many people do abuse it, but no matter how much potential something good has, people will ALWAYS find a way to abuse it. This fast-paced generation definitely creates a lot of anti-socializing and stress, but perhaps people aren't seeing how it could be the opposite as well. Maybe if these people (in the example) shopped online for 15 minutes one day, they could possibly save all that time trying on clothes and driving store to store and use it to go grab lunch together or go to the beach or simply catch up over drinks. In the business world, the quicker you get an answer on one thing, the quicker you can do another which translates into profits. The most clear example to me is when people reminisce about the "good ol' days" when you had to spend hours in the library to do research for a paper and say that the internet is a cheapened way to approach academics. It is the opposite; the quicker we can research on the internet, the quicker we can find out more and get connections to more in-depth research and exactly where to find it.
ReplyDelete