I would like to turn this around slightly. Social networks are necessary and will be for a very long time as curation networks. The alternative is simple too much information to deal with.<p>Here is an excerpt from a blog post called "Slaves to the Feed - This is not the realtime we've been looking for" I wrote some years ago:<p>"Let’s start with what most people probably can agree. Information is accumulating online. The amount of available information is increasing at an exponential rate, some say it doubles every second year. This mean that any illusion of being able to stay up to date with everything that is going on is utopian and has been probably since Guttenberg invented the press.<p>Most people know this, yet that is exactly exactly what we all seem to be doing.<p>There is no shortage of content aggregators and aggregators of aggregators, daily developed to give us a better overview of all the sources of information we have subscribed to and found ourselves now depending on.<p>This has resulted in an endless stream of articles, news, pictures, websites, products, updates, comments of updates and comments to these comments, being delivered to us second by second that each of us have to deal with.<p>Constantly checking our feeds for new information, we seem to be hoping to discover something of interest, something that we can share with our networks, something that we can use, something that we can talk about, something that we can act on, something we didn’t know we didn’t know.<p>It almost seems like an obsession and many critics of digital technology would argue that by consuming information this way we are running the danger of destroying social interaction between humans. One might even say that we have become slaves of the feed.<p>It might be an obsession, but I think it’s an obsession that many critics will find themselves having to submit to sooner or later.
..."<p><a href="http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtime-weve-been-looking-for" rel="nofollow">http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtim...</a>