I once read a statistic that looked at how fast an earthquake travels compared to how quickly news travels on Twitter. Yup, you guessed it. Twitterers within the earthquake radius would know about the oncoming earthquake before it actually reached them. The problem, however, is that they would be delayed a further few seconds from escaping the carnage because they simply had to retweet what they had just read.
In South Africa, though, we don’t have earthquakes. We have taxis with sub woofers. Problem is, we’ve all been deaf since 1994, but generally if the building starts shaking and the windows shatter, we attribute it to a passing minibus.
Social networking and social media is, for the most part, gaining rapid traction in South Africa. Yup, we’re with it… not exactly first-world, but we’re fairly savvy when it comes to the online social scene. For instance, we know enough to know that MySpace is like a township in social media terms – everyone’s moving out of there and towards where the money is.
Many South Africans are starting to consider e-mail old school. Now we just DM on Twitter. And when it comes to corporate strategy, businesses in South Africa are starting to understand, along with the rest of the world, that magazines and newspapers are what people used to advertise in. Sad, but true.
Jobless people are also catching on – they stand at traffic lights with signs saying “Will work for Twitter followers”. Those are usually people who were fired because they were caught out for a scathing Facebook or Twitter update about their boss. Occasionally, the boss is also out on the street without a job… but that’s because of an embarrassing moment which ended up on Youtube.
In South Africa’s social sphere, Twitter is the taxi and Facebook is the city. And hawu, it’s a colourful city. This is where you get real insight into South African sub-culture and the social sphere, mainly through updates or comments.
White people generally update their status about how close it is to the weekend. Bruin ous generally upd8 der st8s wit no vwls or as few characters as possible (the root cause of this is from habits with mobile phones and a general bruin ou paranoia about being charged per character, rather than per sms… same paranoia applies to Facebook).
Then there’s all our musician friends on Facebook, who only ever invite you to their gigs and never share anything from their personal life. “Friends” on Facebook takes on a liberal meaning. It usually goes something like: “Jamming in Hillbrow tonight – gonna be a killer gig!! Pull in and support SA music!” and the irony is never actually intended. This is followed by comments, either on a event wall or a status… usually something like: “Sorry bru, bit far to travel from Canada.”
Ah yes, social South Africa. Spend a bit of time and you’ll learn a few things about this colourful country.
Alternatively,
By short, we mean affordable-papers.net that it should be no longer than two hundred words.
keep them up.
