Shopping more because of social media?

Is Twitter, Foursquare, or Facebook influencing your shopping this holiday season? The following video discusses how some retailers are using social media to get shoppers through their doors: http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/business&id=7766664

Baran and Davis cite McLuhan for explaining that, “The medium is the message (and the massage). In other words, new forms of media transform (massage) our experience of ourselves and our society, and this influence is ultimately more important than the content that is transmitted in its specific messages-technology determines experience” (220). Do you agree? When we look at the problems of cyberbullying and sexting, I think this is very true. And now retailors are using social media to come into your home and entice you out of it instead of encouraging you to shop online. Has the Internet and now social media changed the way you see yourself or society? Did you ever realize that Facebook, Twitter, and other apps/sites allow you to be "social" with your favorite retailors? How has that changed your shopping experience?

Erik Qualman points out that everything is different because of social media in his Youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFZ0z5Fm-Ng&feature=related

Qualman and McLuhan have a point, but is there a limit to this transformation that takes place as media shifts? I think there is and so does John Tomlinson who writes that, “Though the media may be analytically separable from other aspects of culture, it is clear that they are intimately connected with these other aspects in terms of people’s ‘lived experience’. People’s experience of television, for example, is very often within the cultural context of the family and this context has a significant mediating effect (224). As someone who grew up without cable television I can attest to this.

How have your ‘lived experiences’ mediated the ways you’ve changed with or adapted to new media technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, BBM, Oovoo, and/or even HD? In what ways are these technologies affecting your or your family’s consumption?