Shopping is About to Become Social

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. 

Reaction to Week 6 Readings

In Boyd and Ellison’s article about social networking sites, they provide a definition of social networking sites and include in the definition that the sites are not really to network and create relationships with strangers, but rather to link and connect to people that you already have an existing relationship or connection. While I agree that this is true, especially with Facebook and other similar social networks, I think that other social media is straying from this and serves primarily to establish connections with people, products or companies.

 In chapter 8 of PR 2.0, Neal Gorenflo is interviewed and states that social networking and social media is changing the way business is being done and for the better in most cases. He says that social media and social networking allows “engaging customers in deep and meaningful ways in every stage of the product lifecycle.” This is an example of social networking being used to create connections rather than connect within existing relationships. Social networking continues to change and new uses for it are continually arising. As the evolution continues, I think that defining what exactly it is and what it is used for will become increasingly difficult.