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Social media v. personal interaction

The spread of social media is passing from the early majority to the late majority of adopters. For example, Facebook cites a U.S. audience of 155 million and a global audience of 874 million as of July 2012. It's reported that there are "1.08 billion smartphone users in the world, out of which, 91.4 million are from the United States" Demographically speaking, the spread of adoption is starting its migration from urban to rural users.

How can we expect wider adoption to affect how we use social media and handheld devices? It may make the hinterlands less isolated. But maybe not. Consider a subculture in urban America, one that is commonly among the early adopters.

Recently, Chase Whiteside wrote on the effect that social media apps have had on meeting people in public. His specific discussion focuses on a gay-connection app named Grindr.

Like gay bars, these services serve a practical need. While straight men live in a world where most of the women they encounter could at least potentially be attracted to them, gay men live in a world where most of the men they encounter would not be, under any circumstance. So we seek situations where the probability of meeting someone is higher. ...

You can specify if you’re looking for “right now” or later, lock and unlock photos for specific users, and friend them or “block” them. You can even see the people who looked at your profile and decided not to contact you, triggering distressing little moments of self-doubt.

Grindr ... harnesses the awesome power of GPS to reveal other Grindr-enabled gays in your vicinity, who are terrifyingly sorted by proximity down to the foot, turning your cellphone into a literal “gaydar.”

These services encourage us to turn our predilections into requirements, confusing improbable fantasies with expectations. As a result, many gay men fear succeeding with someone as much as they fear rejection—why settle if you can hold out for the man of your dreams?

A user functions as the product and consumer, the objectified and the objectifier. An inch too tall, a year too old, or a mile too far, and you may be filtered out of consideration by an unsympathetic search algorithm.

...[The] services’ abundance of offerings hastens the social-networking phenomenon of replacing a few deep relationships with a mass of shallow contacts. ...

But the last time I set foot in a gay club I was mystified. Approaching a guy the “old-fashioned” way meant vying with their device for attention. Looking at all of the guys who ostensibly came to the club to meet one another instead transfixed like bugs by the glow of tiny, private screens had me feeling ‘double-rainbow’ incredulous: what does it mean!? 

It means ... hard-earned, real-world communities have been hijacked by for-profit web services. It means that the experience of finding someone is rigidly dictated and limited by the design whims of programmers. It means the death of flirting and the rise of people who’d rather virtually “poke” someone than face the absolute social horror of approaching them in the flesh.

Whiteside's analysis misses one other culpability: the lack of market analysis to understand more than one issue at a time. Though an app like Grindr may bring people in contact, converting close proximity to a meeting, the app perhaps offers too much information of less consequence. The sort of information that may be easier to quantify than, say, "Plays well with others."

I presume that apps similar to Grindr are available to the heterosexual denizens of non-gay bars. But I'm not so sure that the need is there, so much.

Clearly, the greatest need for Grindr is in the geographic areas that have yet to see smartphones in great volumes, where gay bars are a hundred miles away and yet many gay men and women live.