As I predicted in this story, Twitter is taking over the world and turning everyone into mindless internet zombies. Now I’ve got proof!

Most of my friends use twitter on a casual basis, including myself (plug: here’s my twitter feed) but I do have a few friends that claim to hate it. It seems like for a lot of people, having a strong opinion about social media is important, so the act of hating it, simply because it’s so widespread, is a way of… I don’t know, showing inner strength, or something. It’s also easy to write off social media as a symbol of decadent American consumerism, or a growing sense of entitlement, or a misplaced notion of extreme narcissism. While there’s a case for all of that (I personally think such arguments are overblown, but thats just me) I found this video particularly fascinating:

Now, the end of the video gives a link to the source for all their statistics. I didn’t go through and try to verify them all, but if these numbers are true, then… holy cow. Also, I don’t know how much these numbers are being adjusted for things like spam bots, and the like. Even with all that factored in, this is pretty interesting stuff. Although I think it’s less about “social media” and more about the internet in general. I think social media is one of many important by-products that the internet brings along with it. The idea of being permanently connected to vast sources of user-driven content gives us a change in how society works — social media is but one aspect of that, and I think there will be more such consequences of the internet that haven’t yet shown themselves.

I obviously find this kind of stuff fascinating, but I’m interested to hear what you guys think.