Is Social media causing the world to “devolve”?

I sat through an interesting presentation this week given by Michael Fredrick of Point 2 Point Central.  Michael is a web developer who has grown up in the online world and has a different perspective on things than those of us who grew up “offline” so to speak.

The presentation was designed to educate business owners about how social media has grown into an 800 pound gorilla; and what they should be tuned in to if they want to keep from falling behind.  He also talked about the evolution of social media and where it’s headed in the coming years.

Some interesting facts from Point2Point about the growing world of social media

• 20% of American’s consume fast food daily and 50% use social networking sites daily
• Wikipedia has more than 14 million articles and 85,000 contributors

Facebook:

• Facebook has more than 500 million active users
• 50% of them are on Facebook every day
• Zynga, the creators of Farmville, is currently worth $5 billion!

Twitter:

• Twitter has more than 100 million users
• Twitter is adding 300k new users per day!
• Twitter gets 180 million unique visitors to the site every day
• Twitter is handling more than 55 million tweets per day

You Tube:

• People are watching 2 billion videos per day
• Every minute, 24 hours of video is being uploaded to You Tube

Word Press

• Over 25 million WordPress publishers
• Over 260 million people visit a WordPress site or blog every month

What does all this mean?

We know from previous studies that the #1 reason people go online is to “pass time.”  But what does the growth of the social websites mean?

For business owners, it means more new things to learn – because they can no longer ignore what’s happening in the online world.

For everyone else, does this mean the world is “devolving”?  Meaning that people are acting less like people and more like machines connecting through the digital world?  Only time will tell!