Watkins: The Very Well Connected

S. Craig Watkins is a professor at the University of Texas-Austin in the Radio-Television-Film department. His area of study focuses on young people's social and digital media behaviors (UT-Austin). He has written three books: The Young and the Digital (2009), Hip Hop Matters (2005), Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (1998). His upcoming book will discuss evolving digital media and social inequality. His main focus is to help people utilize digital media to help them build social capital and connect them with social and civic technologies that can apply to real world applications. The reviews of the piece are generally positive as Watkins is praised for his findings on social media. The piece is written towards academics and scholars, but the style can be understood by parents who would be most interested in the content. Parents would be highly interested in this book because of Watkins insights on children and their usage of social media.

The chapter "The Very Well Connected," discusses the changes in communication between individuals and the arguments of whether or not strong connections have become weaker or vice versa. The internet is a tool to not only bring information to people, but also people to people (Watkins, 52). He argues with personal experiences of subjects that communication and relationships have not become weaker, rather they have changed into less deeper conversations that do not occur at one moment in time. A person could leave a brief message on another individual's Facebook wall and wait for them to respond later. Communication has evolved to, "enable us to keep up contact with more people, albeit in ways that are typically brief and casual rather than extensive and always deep" (Watkins, 68). Relationships are still deep and intimate, but that intimacy has evolved to shorter, but more meaningful communication. It is still too early to determine whether or not the internet has strengthen or weaken relationships, but early evidence will suggest that it may strengthen relationships that are already strong and social media will be a compliment to face-to-face communication. The Internet has brought great speed to the flow of information and has made non-face-to-face communication almost instantaneous. With these developments, the content of messages also become shorter and quicker to read, but still contain genuine feelings between individuals.

Watkins brings up the concept of strong and weak relationships, which forms the basis of his arguments. He shows that strong relationships contain deep and genuine communication between individuals, whereas weak relationships lack these basic qualities (Watkins, 54). These are generally related to offline relationships. The argument that is made asserts that these relationships are threatened and intimate offline relationships may become extinct due to the rise in Internet communications. Watkins then shows that people will always maintain these offline relationships because several relationships on the Internet can be formed between individuals who possess no personal information about each other. I found it interesting that Watkins concludes that social media can be used as supplement to personal offline relationships. Communication mediums do not have to be divided, rather they can merge together and be used to supplement each other. After reading this, I completely agree with his points and they apply to my life similarly to those subjects mentioned in the chapter.

Works Cited

Watkins, S. C. (2009). The Very Well Connected. The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future. Boston: Beacon Press.

http://rtf.utexas.edu/faculty/s-craig-watkins