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BBC—Children growing up alongside the rise of social networking websites may have a “potentially dangerous” view of the world, says a leading psychiatrist. Dr Himanshu Tyagi said sites such as Facebook and MySpace may be harmful. He told the Royal College of Psychiatrists annual meeting people with active online identities might place less value on their real lives. And the West London Mental Health NHS Trust expert added this could raise the risk of impulsive acts or even suicide.

“It’s a world where everything moves fast and changes all the time, where relationships are quickly disposed at the click of a mouse, where you can delete your profile if you don’t like it, and swap an unacceptable identity in the blink of an eye for one that is more acceptable.” He said: “People used to the quick pace of online social networking may soon find the real world boring and unstimulating. More

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Glenn Derene wrote an interesting piece titled, “How Social Networking Could Kill Web Search as We Know It”. He suggests that “with the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Second Life, LinkedIn and even Google’s own Orkut, the next generation of Web users may find what they want by using their social network rather than a search algorithm”.

He points out that because we are already “meta-tagging ourselves through our social networking memberships, shopping habits and surfing addictions, it’s conceivable that the information could attempt to find us…it could tumble through the various filters you set up around your identity and then show up on your home-page news feed, or in your in box, or pop up on a ticker that follows you around as you browse from page to page.”

I don’t think there’s any question about it; that’s exactly what’s going to happen. What comes to mind is the science fiction film, Zardoz. I don’t refer to the plot, but rather the technological device employed by the film’s characters.

Each character in Zardoz wore a ring that served as a communication device connecting all of society’s members audiovisually, much like our camera phones today. Issues and decisions were presented and voted on simultaneously by each member of the film’s futuristic society whose structure was horizontal (like social networking sites), not vertical as in today’s corporate structure outside the Web. Add talking billboards to the scenario, as was depicted in the film Blade Runner, or a talking medicine cabinet with a voice asking “What’s wrong?” when the cabinet door opens like in THX1138, and that’s Western culture in 10-20 years.

In the future, upon opening my car door in the morning, I could here a speech engine try and sell me something through my car’s GPS navigation system, or a targeted radio add based on my prior evening’s Web searches.

Read Glenn Derene’s article here

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