Social Networking

I've been reading 'Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality' in spurts, sometimes stopping to wonder what would have happened had I known some of the things in the book 20 - even 10 - years ago. Where ideas are easy for me, some hard introspection shows that I haven't been able to follow through on some of them. In some instances, it was simply me charging against the world with an idea and a lighter - in others, I probably could have done more to bring things to fruition had I been more organized.

There's a de facto paralysis that happens when one tries to do too many things at the same time. Some people are better at it than others for reasons that could be blamed on gender, genetics or experience. And some people are worse at it. The key, really, is organization and pragmatism - two things that I am above average at but I don't necessarily use on everything I do. I've got at least 6 projects I'm working on, one that will pay regardless, so the triage is somewhat easy. Even so, a little more organization will allow some cross pollenation, and I'm working on that today.

But as I work on it today, I couldn't help but wonder how many people out there are paralyzed by social media - addicted to Twitter streams, to Facebook status updates, waiting for an IM or text message. I daresay that at least a year of innovation is lost every week to that around the world - perhaps even a year of innovation per day is lost as people wait to see what their friends are doing, what someone else is thinking, in the hope that some answer that they need will show up. The odds of that are pretty slim and the paralysis of it is quite real.

As my old man would say: "Get off your ass and do something."

There's a whole lot of people out there talking about how social media is changing the world. About how social networks are changing the world. About how the world has forever changed. Then people read something like Malcolm Gladwell's article and... quietly ignore the truths laid out plainly.

Social Media isn't changing the world. It's letting everyone connect in different and interesting ways as much as we can stand - and annoying and bullying each other, enough so that some even have committed suicide. And while everyone talks about that cyber-bullying, they tend to completely ignore the cyberbullying happening through hate speech, amongst other things. I don't mean to paint a bad picture, just a realistic one - one that tempers the social media evangelists who so idolize that which... pays their bills.

Funny enough, social media pays my bills. But there's something to social media that most people who sell it like sliced bread fail to acknowledge.

Social media is a tool. It is only a tool. And we who would play with it do so not knowing what parts are dangerous, what parts useful, what parts worth saving and what parts should be thrown out. Ask a social media 'expert' about online privacy and they'll probably tell you about Facebook settings instead of the fact that the business model of so much social media is selling information that users give freely, directly or indirectly. There isn't even a negotiation. And where a copyright and patent system were outdated 10 years ago, they are primeval now.

Social media is that tool in the garage your Dad didn't let you play with until you were 'old enough'.

And yet the benefits of social media and social networking are there. And it's still not changing the world.

Our relationships exist in multidimensional spheres. To get there from here and further, we should probably get rid of some misconceptions.

Getting Grounded In The Sphere

A belief in institutions did not bring mankind committees, churches, governments, unions and other things. A belief in institutions did not bring mankind health-care, spaceflight, commercial flight and the Internet. This belief in institutions did not bring us an economy based on markets. This belief in institutions did not make democracy the least wrong system of government on Spaceship Earth. This belief in institutions did not give us the modern multinational corporation.

This belief also didn't give us the Public Domain, Copyright, Patents and prosecuting children for sharing. This belief didn't make invading countries by getting 'public opinion' swayed a good thing.

There is no belief in institutions. The belief that makes us do these things is a belief that if we work together we can do things greater than if we had acted individually. The belief in institutions is that for a relationship to be worthwhile it must be permanent and must never change. 'Bureaucracy protects', says the old wisdom.

Change is uncomfortable, unsettling and unavoidable. It haunts us every morning in the mirror more and more as we become older. Where once a young man might celebrate a single hair on the chin, he might later reflect on that and remember the happiness while staring at a sea of grey swimming around the islands of black - maybe that makes change more painful as we grow older. No one really knows.

The uncomfortable reality is that, despite our best efforts, things change and it seems that they are constantly changing faster than our institutions can accommodate.

The future is made up of realities and choices, and at any given time there are many pathways to it. The choices include the people around you, the actions that you take with them and the actions they take with you - as well as the interactions of the whole mess of that with the realities of the environment as seen by everyone involved... even those not in the 'network'.

Last week I lost a friend who I had known only for a year. He didn't use Twitter or Facebook; he started off herding cows and built a multi-million dollar automotive-related business from there based on risk-taking, sound decisions and most of all - hard work. You could eat on his reputation. In fact, many did due to his generosity. So after losing him last week, knowing that the world was a lesser place without him and also knowing that pathways had closed I considered it all very deeply.

When I posted on it on Facebook, I got messages of support. But no one knew this person, and it almost seems like sacrilege to write about him on these sites because he was more real than the majority of people who follow my doings here, there, or anywhere. When all my other real friends became distant - perhaps because I began to get dirt under my fingernails (how distasteful!) and being as hands on as I usually am while damning the pseudo-aristocracy, this friend was someone who wanted nothing from me. I wanted nothing from him. For both of us in that environment - in this environment - that is a luxury. In a world where people beat on our doors because we're sympathetic and casually empathetic, we allowed ourselves the abuses and pointed out that our weaknesses and strengths were synonymous. While we gave, we never took for nothing and we never leeched others to get what we have or what we wanted... or even what we needed.