By Kerryn Le Cordeur

The nature of social media is such that our lives are broadcast online, our social circles are much wider, as is our scope for knowledge and we quite often (well, some of us, anyway) find ourselves living in this virtual space rather than engaging fully with the ‘real’ world. So it’s no surprise, really, that the notion of anti-social media has cropped up, bringing with it several different implications, from taking a stand against social media as a whole, to the need for anonymity online, a greater need to ‘live in the moment’ and even the changing nature of social media.

Martin Carstens discusses that no sooner has an event occurred, than it is fed into the “ever expanding life documentary repository we call the internet,” thanks to the ubiquitous nature of social media. As such, we never have to worry about forgetting any memorable experience because they are all digitised and disseminated to friends and family for posterity.

However, Carstens questions what the effect of this is when it means that instead of just enjoying a moment with our loved ones in real time, we are compelled to tweet about it or take photos to load onto Facebook – great to look back on, but perhaps causing us to not be quite as present in the moment. From this perspective, there is definitely a need to separate ourselves at some point from social media and re-learn what it means to be social. As Carstens says, “Perhaps the key is balance and the conscious decisions that lead us to use technology to augment our experiences, instead of watering them down… There is no doubt that social media is useful and it plays an integral role in organising events… The impulse to document the event through technology and social media must, however, be discouraged.”

So perhaps anti-social media should refer to the idea that the concept be shifted, almost replacing interactions with people we should have relationships with offline, to rather being used in a professional sense, where it is beneficial to reach many people simultaneously, while maintaining a level of personability. Unsocial www.crunchbase.com/company/unsocial is a social network that operates on just this concept – it doesn’t care about any of your friends, focusing rather on the people you don’t know, but probably should. It is geared towards professionals who want to connect with other professionals in similar or related fields, who happen to be nearby.

Moving away from who we should communicate with in this space to how we do so, another memburn contributer, Andrew Craucamp, writes that we are equally obsessed with online privacy and with maintaining our Facebook profiles and growing our Twitter following. So where is the line drawn between online anonymity and broadcasting ourselves online for all to see?

It was with the launch of MySpace and Facebook and later Twitter that the concept of broadcasting our real life personas online was born. However, while most of us do this without a second thought (hopefully after putting a few privacy settings in place), not everyone is as comfortable with the idea that their thoughts are being shared with the world, recorded for posterity in the digital space.

The solution to this, bar not participating online at all, is to create an online persona. But Craucamp suggests this could be regarded as anti-social media – especially on platforms like Facebook which promote the use of your real identity to encourage transparent interaction among users who know each other. Cue the rise of programmes such as 4chan.org, an anti-social network that offers users a platform to air their views on a host of topics, no matter how controversial, without their true identities being revealed. Another such platform is the website, www.toilet.wen.ru, which is popular in South Africa and causing a lot of controversy as a result of the damaging comments being made, as the anonymity the site allows means that social restraints are essentially removed.

What happens, though, if you are the unfortunate individual the comments on such a site are referring to? Or what if you regret some of the status updates, tweets or photos you’ve sent out into the social media sphere? Once it’s in the digital space, it’s there for posterity, right? According to Daily Finance, this is not so – not if you have an app called the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. The app allows users to “wipe your online slate completely clean and eliminate most traces of your social media indiscretions.” It experienced great success in 2009, helping to unfriend 50 000 friends and remove more than 150 000 tweets. It seems this trend is on the rise, with more and more stories cropping up detailing how social networks have interfered with the lives, grades and productivity of thousands of users who have become addicted to their news feeds and sharing every detail of their lives.

No surprise that Facebook has blocked Web 2.0 Suicide and is no longer allowing it to access Facebook accounts. But amid the 500-million strong Facebook user base, the creators of the app claim that “Life is actually richer, more productive and better without the social networking tools.” And in reality, even dedicated social media users are admitting that enough is enough, with Beth Kanter writing in a blog post that “A Twitter hiatus can be good for resetting your goals or understanding any bad habits.” On a personal level, I have several friends who occasionally remove themselves from Facebook for a period when they feel it has become too distracting… although most of them return after not too long.

The question is, though, what are the consequences of wiping your social media slate clean? New starts are great and living in the moment rather than considering how good that phrase would be as a tweet or how good that photo would look as a profile picture is even better, but there’s no doubt we’ve come to rely on this technology. Whether on a personal level to stay in touch with long-distance friends or to be reminded of our contacts’ birthdays, or on a professional level to network with clients, consumers and stakeholders, social media is certainly a useful tool.

Just mulling over the term ‘anti-social media’, the connotations are endless, over and above what I mentioned here. There’s the idea of traditional media not willingly embracing social media, PRs not truly understanding how and when to implement a social media strategy for their clients… and what about an everyday user not being active on their profile – surely these all constitute being anti-social in this space? Share your thoughts on our blog.