On April 3rd, Skype unveiled
its latest $12 million advertising campaign under the headlines “It’s time for
Skype” which takes a stab at both Facebook and Twitter as social networking
devices that live solely live digitally, and promotes its own ‘face to face’
digital form of keeping in touch.
Currently, as a student of the Design
and Management world, and an intern with in the Advertising industry, issues
around ethics and competition become part of the daily vernacular, but what
happens when these produced stories leak the truth? Has our digital social
behavior begun to dictate our nature within the tangible public sphere?
We live in a world that functions in multiple
dimensions- digitally and tangibly. But what concerns me is that is this world
transforming beyond our conscious understanding as a solely digital public
sphere, is it on its way to or even- has it already transformed?
In my Design
Development class last year, I worked with my team to develop a solution- a
third space that existed between the digital and tangible world of social
interactions but it received mixed reactions from the class. Considering that tools like MeetUp haven't grown to the standards that Facebook and Twitter have set, is the concept too far
fetched to grow from a classroom, or has our social spheres morphed into their next eras?
-Maryam H.
