On Saturday, I conducted an interview with Jake Reilly, a young copywriting student from the Chicago Portfolio School. He had just finished a self-imposed exile from all social media, email, cell phone, texting and television which he referred to as "going Amish." He felt that these things were too much of a distraction from actual real-life personal interactions and that the superficial types of communication that can occur through texting, tweeting or Facebook messaging were crutches that interfered with real relationships.
I finished the article Sunday evening and it was posted first to the news page at Yahoo! (news.yahoo.com) as many of my interviews are. Later it was added to the text list of news articles on the front page at Yahoo.com. It was moderately popular there, and so it was elevated by Yahoo! to the featured article scroll at the top of the page, added to Editor's Picks and Today on Yahoo! The latter two appear at the bottom of every news page on Yahoo!
The short story is that the article was very visible on a very popular web property for a little more than 36 hours. For a while, it was the number one most popular article at Yahoo.com. What is interesting though, is that this article was also the most shared on Yahoo.com. In other words, this story about a young man who felt he was overdependent on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, was shared more than 8000 times on Facebook, well over 1000 times on Twitter, and generated at least 32,000 page views coming directly in from links sent out on Twitter.
The article talking about one man's struggle with social media addiction went viral. In total it racked up more than one million readers in the first 24 hours that it was up. I don't yet have totals beyond that as my reporting is delayed. During the 36 hours that it was being heavily featured on Yahoo! it reached a peak of 750 visits per hour from Twitter alone (a small percentage of the overall traffic total). However, the day after it was removed from the Yahoo! front page, it was still drawing Twitter traffic and reached a new peak of more than 1000 visits per hour from Twitter links. The article has social media inertia.
As I conducted the interview, I found myself quite interested in what Jake had to say. Clearly, many people his age use social media, cell phones and texting in a much different way than people my age do, and people a generation older than I am use it differently still. The comments on the article also show that the readers view texting and social media differently as well. Older folks say things like "I never use that stuff, but I can barely get my grandchildren to look up from their cellphones. Congratulations to Jake for breaking free from it all."
Those Jake's age who are heavy users of Twitter and smart phones make comments like "I could never do that" or "I want to try that." Those his age who did not develop the texting habit, and many my age who use social media applications, but not heavily say things like "That's stupid. Anybody could go without. I do it all the time."
The range of the comments themselves help to underscore the point that I tried to make int he article. Technology isn't evil or something to be avoided, using 140 character texts as proxies for real human interaction is the problem. Real communication involves depth of feeling and emotion that simply can't be conveyed in a text message that takes 12 seconds to write. When the majority of our communication is filtered through this insufficient medium, we lose the very connection that defines real human interaction. For some, it's not a problem, but for a whole generation, it is becoming increasingly common.
Whatever one's perspective on the issue, the article struck a chord with a wide variety of readers. When all the updates are in, I expect something like two million readers will have read the article and roughly 1 in 40 of them will have shared it with their circle of virtual friends through social media, making this my most widely read news article to date.
It was not about a celebrity, or someone expounding on some popular news item, but simply a story about one young man who decided to step outside his comfort zone to reassert his humanity.
I finished the article Sunday evening and it was posted first to the news page at Yahoo! (news.yahoo.com) as many of my interviews are. Later it was added to the text list of news articles on the front page at Yahoo.com. It was moderately popular there, and so it was elevated by Yahoo! to the featured article scroll at the top of the page, added to Editor's Picks and Today on Yahoo! The latter two appear at the bottom of every news page on Yahoo!
The short story is that the article was very visible on a very popular web property for a little more than 36 hours. For a while, it was the number one most popular article at Yahoo.com. What is interesting though, is that this article was also the most shared on Yahoo.com. In other words, this story about a young man who felt he was overdependent on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, was shared more than 8000 times on Facebook, well over 1000 times on Twitter, and generated at least 32,000 page views coming directly in from links sent out on Twitter.
The article talking about one man's struggle with social media addiction went viral. In total it racked up more than one million readers in the first 24 hours that it was up. I don't yet have totals beyond that as my reporting is delayed. During the 36 hours that it was being heavily featured on Yahoo! it reached a peak of 750 visits per hour from Twitter alone (a small percentage of the overall traffic total). However, the day after it was removed from the Yahoo! front page, it was still drawing Twitter traffic and reached a new peak of more than 1000 visits per hour from Twitter links. The article has social media inertia.
As I conducted the interview, I found myself quite interested in what Jake had to say. Clearly, many people his age use social media, cell phones and texting in a much different way than people my age do, and people a generation older than I am use it differently still. The comments on the article also show that the readers view texting and social media differently as well. Older folks say things like "I never use that stuff, but I can barely get my grandchildren to look up from their cellphones. Congratulations to Jake for breaking free from it all."
Those Jake's age who are heavy users of Twitter and smart phones make comments like "I could never do that" or "I want to try that." Those his age who did not develop the texting habit, and many my age who use social media applications, but not heavily say things like "That's stupid. Anybody could go without. I do it all the time."
The range of the comments themselves help to underscore the point that I tried to make int he article. Technology isn't evil or something to be avoided, using 140 character texts as proxies for real human interaction is the problem. Real communication involves depth of feeling and emotion that simply can't be conveyed in a text message that takes 12 seconds to write. When the majority of our communication is filtered through this insufficient medium, we lose the very connection that defines real human interaction. For some, it's not a problem, but for a whole generation, it is becoming increasingly common.
Whatever one's perspective on the issue, the article struck a chord with a wide variety of readers. When all the updates are in, I expect something like two million readers will have read the article and roughly 1 in 40 of them will have shared it with their circle of virtual friends through social media, making this my most widely read news article to date.
It was not about a celebrity, or someone expounding on some popular news item, but simply a story about one young man who decided to step outside his comfort zone to reassert his humanity.
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