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Ice Cream Social
Dec. 8th, 2008 04:12 pm"Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding"
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Today I attended a business meeting on social media. An internationally renowned communications company invited me and a work colleague to have a chat about the power of social media and how it can help us achieve our business and public policy objectives.
The discussion was all about thinking of the Internet in general (and social media, in particular) as not so much a tool but a collection of communities. By harnessing and building these communities, so the thinking goes, we can establish ourselves as a leader on our public policy issues. Or maybe it was building and then harnessing. Possibly it would be necessary to build a harness. To tell you the truth I kind of zoned out there, briefly.
The point is -- and I knew this before I even got in the meeting room -- that social media constitutes the new paradigm. I had already mastered blogging, but the ethos of blogging is practically unipolar. The fully actualized citizen must graduate to more interactive and communal enterprises. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter ... these are today's telephony.
I had good reasons for avoiding these places (bad prior experiences, techno-agoraphobia, social malaise) and bad reasons (knee-jerk contrarianism, crippling insecurity, fear of commitment). Maybe I was just being a reactionary blowhard about it.
Sometimes, when a person is loathe to be the last person to laugh at a joke, they pretend they don't get it.
But Facebook is starting to remind me of the cell phone craze earlier in this decade. I was initially reluctant to embrace the concept of a mobile phone, philosophically convinced that it would be an electronic tether to a cruel and intrusive world, precluding my precious solitude. Eventually I realized that I was being stupid, and now I can call someone when I get lost.
So I guess it's about time I "Faced" up. I can no longer avoid the implications for my profession, which demands facility with social networking technology. And despite my own personal magnetism, I can no longer afford to be out of the loop with friends and family -- not when I find myself hearing second-hand about engagements, expectancies and nonfat mocha soy lattes.
And in three weeks, I won't be updating this page daily anymore. So I might as well give you kind readers another way to keep track of me.
So, as of now, you can find me on Facebook. Which means one of two things will happen: Facebook will go the way of Friendster, and everyone will migrate to something new, probably called "Squaggle" or "Chubbster" or something; or it will consume my life, connecting me to all people and places in such a way that I will become one with the universe, in which case I can give up my cell phone.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Today I attended a business meeting on social media. An internationally renowned communications company invited me and a work colleague to have a chat about the power of social media and how it can help us achieve our business and public policy objectives.
The discussion was all about thinking of the Internet in general (and social media, in particular) as not so much a tool but a collection of communities. By harnessing and building these communities, so the thinking goes, we can establish ourselves as a leader on our public policy issues. Or maybe it was building and then harnessing. Possibly it would be necessary to build a harness. To tell you the truth I kind of zoned out there, briefly.
The point is -- and I knew this before I even got in the meeting room -- that social media constitutes the new paradigm. I had already mastered blogging, but the ethos of blogging is practically unipolar. The fully actualized citizen must graduate to more interactive and communal enterprises. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter ... these are today's telephony.
I had good reasons for avoiding these places (bad prior experiences, techno-agoraphobia, social malaise) and bad reasons (knee-jerk contrarianism, crippling insecurity, fear of commitment). Maybe I was just being a reactionary blowhard about it.
Sometimes, when a person is loathe to be the last person to laugh at a joke, they pretend they don't get it.
But Facebook is starting to remind me of the cell phone craze earlier in this decade. I was initially reluctant to embrace the concept of a mobile phone, philosophically convinced that it would be an electronic tether to a cruel and intrusive world, precluding my precious solitude. Eventually I realized that I was being stupid, and now I can call someone when I get lost.
So I guess it's about time I "Faced" up. I can no longer avoid the implications for my profession, which demands facility with social networking technology. And despite my own personal magnetism, I can no longer afford to be out of the loop with friends and family -- not when I find myself hearing second-hand about engagements, expectancies and nonfat mocha soy lattes.
And in three weeks, I won't be updating this page daily anymore. So I might as well give you kind readers another way to keep track of me.
So, as of now, you can find me on Facebook. Which means one of two things will happen: Facebook will go the way of Friendster, and everyone will migrate to something new, probably called "Squaggle" or "Chubbster" or something; or it will consume my life, connecting me to all people and places in such a way that I will become one with the universe, in which case I can give up my cell phone.
