Social media is making people specialists

People in internet are quite often stuck in subjects. People are either being serious or being funny, talking about business or about environment, politics or sports and so on. That's not the case in real life. In real life some of the most professional guys can be the most funny ones and politically aware people can be really into sports.

Blogs are often focused on certain subjects by nature so maybe those are not the best way to evaluate this situation. Twitter proves my point much better. Twitter is personalized and it is concentrated on the actual person and he's or she's tweets. There are companies also, but mainly it's still actual users. Most of the Twitter users I follow are sticking with quite limited area of subjects. Some of them have taken the role of sharing high tech news, others tweet about social media, some about sports and so forth. Really rarely you see these really mixed.

I'm wondering why is that. In the real life, almost all people I know are willing to discuss, are interested and knowledgeable in multiple different subjects. At least in much wider range of subjects than common Twitter user is (according to my limited experience). Are the tools that make people being stick with subjects they feel most close or is it because the audience?

Maybe it's those combined. Way internet is currently used, creates niches and specialists. People tend to find information from services and places which are specialized in one area and then other information come from another source. Then the same logic also applies to Twitter. I've noticed when I have tweeted about books I've read, I'll get some followers who unfollow me after couple of days when I'm tweeting about something else. I'm not sure if that is a pattern, but I've noticed that to happen often with book blog posts.

Will internet change people so that they will be focused on fewer subjects or will internet actually adjust to meet the needs of generalists also? I think I'm one of the latter ones and that's why I care about this. There's so much interesting stuff all around the world, that I'm not willing to enjoy only a part of it. I know I will lose followers and readers because of that, but social media isn't my job in any means and I prefer being myself than attracting followers with something else.

I find this subject interesting. I just can't believe that people would be that focused really on certain subjects, but maybe they are just using different means and tools for different subjects. That just sounds bit boring, I'm waiting internet to fix it for me.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen