Hug For a Like?

With all this buzz about blogging, I thought I would try my hand at my own blog. Welcome to Sophie's Back Chat, a professional media and communications blog where I will discuss current media issues, comment on the world of blogging and critique public opinion surrounding these topics.

As a media and communications student, I am particularly interested in media effects and the role of the media in contemporary Australian society. Weekly, I will analyse current media news topics and discuss the influence of the type of broadcast and way in which the news event has been presented by various media channels.

This week, the Facebook revolution is the hot topic as Mark Zuckerberg and his team celebrate a billion users since the social networking site’s inception. In a media release, the company has described its new brand campaign launch, in an effort to drive advertising and maintain shareholder confidence. In the media release, Facebook claims central to its mission is ‘to fulfil a fundamental need: to connect’. In a world where social interaction has moved away from the real and towards the virtual, is this not a contradiction? Our lives have become mediated by the internet, as work, personal life and the internet are now fiercely intertwined. But how do the breadth of our connections compare to the depth of connection?

Recent studies conducted in Germany by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business claim even ‘checking social network tweets, pictures, comments and other posts as stronger than sex and cigarettes in terms of temptation’. Even when facebook claims in its mission, ‘to fufill a fundamental need: to connect’, when we are turning down sex, intimacy and real human connection in preference for virtual status updates and likes, how deeply are we really connecting? 

In an effort to re-establish connection on a sensory level, designers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a vest, which when worn, inflates to embrace the participant when other users ‘like’ their facebook activity. The Like-a-Hug vest aims to associate the internet with the physical, connecting the feeling of satisfaction and worth gained through someone ‘liking’ your facebook activity, with the physical act of a hug in an effort to ‘bring back sensory perception’.

The Like-a-Hug Vest, designed by MIT student Melissa Chow

So what does it all mean for the future of human interaction? Are we connecting in more ways and more globally than anyone could have envisaged through the endless possibilities of Facebook? So i ask the question, is this 'connection' really deep, or merely wifi enabled?

Image sources: 
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