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A comment on the article [|"Influence: The New Currency of Web 3.0"]

Measuring social influence is a leap toward Metadata analysis within the ever-growing social networking community. It’s not just about collecting and displaying information as it was created, but also making connections between them. As more data from different sources are compiled together, a mapping that reveals each individual’s social relations with others gradually emerge – that is what Mark Zuckerberg called the” Social Graph”.

Digital influence, according to Rob Dickens, likely will become the next generation social capital. Internet users are trying their best to market themselves on the online social market. These new online features further entrench the use of the social web. More people are intrigued on how influential they are and will make a great effort on expanding their influence by using the social web more frequently. However, as social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn prevail in our everyday life and offer us the convenience to connect with others more effectively than ever before, we loose part of our humanity. We need to constantly regard ourselves as a brand rather than a person in the first place. We obsessively document our lives, post comments and haunt for links sometimes not for our own amusement but to please or impress our followers. Yes, SNS empower us to achieve emancipatory self-expression, but at the same time, it’s taking away something that defines who we are? As we become more enthralled in documenting our lives, we compromise our attention and stop enjoying the moment. We are constantly evaluating our life rather than living it. People are already occupied enough with constant facebook updates, now the option to measure their social impact just add on to the ever-expanding list of things users need to worry about. The more connected we are, the more conscious we are about ourselves. If everything about us is shared and evaluated in an open public sphere, what would happen to our sense of privacy, independence and identity?