There are many wonderful positive sides of the cyberspace in general and the social media in particular. Just think of all the networking, collaboration and getting in touch, vox populi and open discussions, citizen journalism and breaking news, ability to mobilise crowds for valuable causes and reach audiences, create, sell and buy across borders, cross boundaries and share ideas, analysis and any digital content – all with a click of a mouse. This side of the virtual world fosters collaboration and creativity, helps to promote democracy, human rights and the voice of the oppressed.

The cyberspace is also a home to crime, starting with hate speech and ending with paedophilia. But there’s also a grey zone in between that is cluttered with petabytes of irrelevant publicly available private content. Is social media making us waste our time, loose identity and in reality become anti-social?

Increasingly polluted internet

The consumers’ mankind has increasingly polluted the soil, water, air and the space. No surprise that the cyberspace – a copy of real life – is not immune. A huge part of the content the mankind is uploading and consuming is a digital trash.

The cyberspace is clogged with sex, porn and Britney Spears, we are flooded with meaningless Wats up? Hit/poke Me back; Check out my profile And Let me know Do you like me; Good morning twitterland, angry comment entries and in some cases misleading information. Is internet becoming a cyber junkyard with tiny islands of real content here and there?

What do we want?

We want fun, easy money and overnight fame. We need faster, more powerful and bigger capacity gizmos. We are buying more equipment than we need: just as our wardrobes with all those clothes our terabyte hard drives are packed with data we would never use.

We are snapping auto-mode shots with DSLRs, uploading billions of photos and constantly updating our “statuses” online. Yes, there already are kids who feel nervous if they’d spend 30 minutes without updating their “I had my breakfast” messages across multiple social networks.

We want easy digestible information that is prêt à consommer. We like to quickly copy paste, not to create. We need to shout louder than others and use dirty tricks to “optimize” our ability to be heard and seen, thus depreciating the value of digital content and reducing possibilities to find relevant information. As you are only accountable if you breach law, content doesn’t really matter, what matters is the number of views and the traffic you get.

Twitter became the voice of Iranian resistance, but what were you getting among the top entries after clicking the #iranelection couple of weeks ago? Many irrelevant posts decorated with bodies in swimming suits.

Pollution of the virtual world pollutes the real world too. We clog information highways, slow down the internet and yes, we produce CO2, as servers, PCs and networks eat up electricity. We produce 0.2 to 7g of CO2 per Google search, they say.

 We have no more free time, because most of it is spent swallowing information or producing it. You can’t enjoy the moment, because you have to document it and publicise it on the net. That’s the essence of our affluent digital consumer society.

Mass production of information

Let’s face it, much of the information (should we just call it “data”?) we produce is a junk. And the bubble is inflating with exponential speeds.

We have no more free time, because most of it is spent swallowing information or producing it. You can’t enjoy the moment, because you have to document it and publicise it on the net. That’s the essence of our affluent digital consumer society.

We are exhibiting the perfect ourselves rather than spreading ideas we have. It seems that everybody’s shouting, but no one’s listening, because we just can’t keep our attention focused. We keep posting infinite information and are busy running our own reality shows.

We are prosumers of digital content adding “friends”, “fans” and “followers”, but how many of them are genuine ones, not just wanting to increase their own visibility (thanks for the add, who cares)? Are there many people on your list of friends that you’ve never seen after graduating and will probably never see again?

(Anti-)social and (anti-)private media?

If you are not in the cyberspace, you do not exist. Couple of years ago one of my friends was seriously preoccupied that she was “not found by the Google search”. Is person’s value suddenly judged by the number of “friends” on social networks, tags, “likes” and the rating they get? Is it a real life or just a compensation of it?

“It is strange to use my private Facebook account for work purposes”, I said to my German colleague during the election communication campaign. “Private Facebook profile is … a misnomer, like clean coal, or natural plastic”, he said, and that is so true :).

Getting the identity back

Is there a way to separate private from public, but also stop the erosion of privacy online? How can we control our digital shadow and protect ourselves from identity theft? Is leaving a digital footprint good or bad, how can we control it or wipe it off completely? Do we need social networking luddites that would clean up the cyberspace and delete our accounts to protect us from surprises of being tagged? I don’t know, you tell me ;)

P.S. As this entry wasn’t elaborated well enough, I hope its digital footprint won’t be too big and it will be duly recycled into something useful.