Sean Parker Launches Video Chat Site
Unveiled at a celebrity-studded New York event on Tuesday, the new site called Airtime requires that people log in with their Facebook account. It then allows them to video chat with someone who is among their Facebook friends or to find someone to talk to anonymously who shares similar interests. Users also can watch online videos together.
The direction so-called “social” media are taking is leading us towards a world reminiscent of the one foretold by Isaac Asimov in The Naked Sun. From the Wiki entry on the book:
The book focuses on the unusual traditions and culture of Solarian society. The planet has a rigidly controlled population of twenty thousand, and robots outnumber humans ten thousand to one. People are strictly taught from birth to despise personal contact. They live on huge estates, either alone or with their spouse only. Communication is done via holographic telepresence (called viewing, as opposed to in-person seeing). It is likely that the society is based on that in E. M. Forster’s 1909 short story “The Machine Stops”.
Thanks to these allegedly “social” platforms, people are in danger of becoming more and more isolated.