Fun in Social Media?

I was wondering the other day; do we use Social Media such as: Facebook or Twitter for creating and maintaining relationships or do we use it for fun? For example, at Twitter, do we tweet “Wow, that college today was really boring”, because we want to create or maintain a relationship with people who also found the college to be rather boring? Or, do we tweet simply because we can and we think that it’s a fun activity to do? I believe that we might use it for both of the reasons, although the fun factor is the leading one, because why would you engage in any kind of relationship which isn’t fun at all? We like to share funny, interesting, boring or beautiful things that we come across in life and we perceive joy when sharing it with our friends or even strangers, as long as it is entertaining. The joy from sharing also shows itself in messages such as: “you really have to see this” or “you don’t believe what just happened…”. 

Although we have this course called “Social Aspects of New Media” which zooms in on communication & relationships via computer mediated communication (CMC), I am quite convinced that we use these aspects only because it’s fun and perhaps worth noting: because we can. Isn’t it just fun to check out profiles of people which we don’t know, and perhaps laugh at their silly pictures or statements? I don’t think that there is any relationship involved with this attitude, yet it happens. 

Ok, ok I understand that we also want to keep in touch with our friends but then again, isn’t the real reason why we do that to have fun? When I’m bored I log into Facebook, because I want to be entertained and not to start any relationship. How about you?

P.s. Just for fun, check out the videoclip which you can find in my post before this one, quite a funny explanation of Social Media.

Kind regards,

Rik Terpelle