If you have noticed in the past few years, there are now two worlds on this planet of ours. There is Earth in the traditional sense, with all of the physical features that we all know and love. And then there is the Internet and its related online ilk, which has no physical form but is just as manifest (and sometimes just as important) as the world where you can walk around and feel the sunshine on your face. In this new online doppleganger to our physical reality, social networking has become an extremely dominant player in the constant game where the reward for winning is our presence and our energy.
Simply put, the sites where people spend the most time get the most advertising dollars, and sell the most affiliate products and services. Since money makes both of our worlds go around, this means that social networking sites (which sometimes boast populations in the hundreds of millions, and virtual economies which rival those of real world superpowers) are the main game. They have incredible power because of their immense, unwavering popularity. And because of this power, it could even be argued that some of the most important “cities” in this online world are the social networking sites themselves.
If you have a profile on a social networking site, you have the chance to be searched for and accessed by a very large number of different people out there. With all of those people in one place, the amount of energy present on these sites creates an almost audible buzz, which you can feel when the people start trending toward wanting, liking or disliking something. President Obama won the election in no small measure because he won the game of popular opinion on the social networking sites, where people can talk to one another and show their support in a way they never could before.