Is Social Media an Impediment to Problem Solving?

Before Twitter and Yahoo Answers, there was (and still is) Google groups and before that it was called something else.

There have always been plenty of forums where people can seek and find answers. Twitter and Yahoo Answers have just made it easier and as Lee White points out quicker, but as far as I can see it amounts to the same thing – asking somebody else instead of doing the legwork oneself.

If the quality of some recent straight-A graduate co-workers is any indication, the Internet is having a a massively negative impact on the way some people solve problems. I made a very simple request of one recently, and three days later, there were no updates. When I asked her why, she said that no one had answered her on the forums where she asked for the answer.

Worse yet, she was associating the company’s URL with her request. It took everything I had not to start screaming, “Has the Internet made you completely stupid??”

I feel that the instant access to information has only taken the leg work out of forming a decision.

Social media hasn’t stopped me from solving my own problems. In many ways, it has made my problem-solving more efficient because it gives me access to options I might not have otherwise come up with on my own.

Being in the real estate profession, most of my circle consists of other Realtors. This has proved very useful to me because real estate is local, that means that it is practiced differently in different markets. Interacting with other Realtors has given me ideas that might have taken me much longer to arrive at on my own. Are those ideas any less valuable because they came from someone else rather than through my own efforts? I don’t think so.

Unless you sit in a completely empty room, totally alone, ideas and inspiration are always coming from external sources. Social media just seems to increase the access to those sources of ideas and inspiration.

I don’t think so – in fact I think tools like Twitter aren’t inhibiting us from solving problems or using our own creative problem solving – but they are allowing us to crowdsource to get better answers.

it only means we have easier access to information we need. but still, the decision is ours to make.

Interesting discussion Roderick. I can understand you’re thinking, but I don’t believe social media automatically leads to a lack of critical thinking.

There will always be some who prefer to find information themselves and there will always be some who ask others for the information. In the end we all still have to make our own decisions on what we think is right and wrong.

The internet in general allows us to have access to more information quickly than we’ve ever had before. With so many sources of information and answers the skill is in deciding which source to trust. That requires more than a single source.

You might sooner trust a person that has shown they are a good source. So if in the past Bob has shown to be an expert in automotive repair I might ask him my automotive repair question to save me time on that particular query. It might also be a subject where I’m not all that interested in learning more.

Bob then may ask me questions about web development because he knows I’ve put in the time there and he’s not interested in becoming the expert when it comes to web development.

We’re still all solving problems and thinking critically in general, but we can still lean on others for solutions in specific areas.

I think that the lazy brain concept can be lloked at differently. Tweets, IMs and the like are a form of education for researching with assistance. Sometimes, especially being a newbie to SEO for example, others that we are following may have a better understanding of the topic we are examining, making them a prime source of aid to send us in he right direction.

Am I offbase? Did my neck blow a bubble?

Having information spoonfed does spoil you. It would make your mind rust. That said, reinventing the wheel is not desirable either. So if someone else has already done what you need to do, get him to give it to you. The deciding factors here would be the amount of time required to get he information yourself, the degree of specialization in the field etc etc.

In the age of the information superhighway we have truly come to expect answers and directions when we need it, which is usual right away.

Like some have mentioned before, in the past before social networks, before the internet, you called someone who knew. Before that, you ask your dad or the local elder.