March 13th, 2009
“Social Media” …our new favorite buzzword? …or more than that? Is all this blogifying taking us anywhere?
Meaning many different things to many different people social media consists of, at least partially, the twittering, blogging, networking, sharing, collaborating, communicating, contenting and contexting facilitated by the many tubes and pipes of our ever evolving internet.
Social Media in Plain English
As I spend more time participating in and thinking about social media, I find myself considering the real potential of this stuff…thinking about what it all means. Is this stuff really a big deal? Does social media really matter? Sure it’s cool. Sure it has its own celebrities, gatherings and culture. Sure it can be fun and it clearly provides some new opportunities to make money, to learn about our craft and / or what we are interested in.
But.
Will the world actually be in some real and important way different because of social media? Is social media transformational? …revolutionary? …evolutionary? I am not yet sure of the answer, but I do have some thoughts on the topic.
A quick disclaimer… I am not a social media expert and have never been mistaken for one. I am also not a guru or thought-leader. I am the guy that shows up somewhere online and generally breaks the “rules” that the cool kids have already established because I didn’t even know that they existed. I have never been to SXSW and nobody there has ever missed me. I pay no attention to Gary V. or Guy Kawasaki or Scoble…and they could care less. I recently spoke at a Social Media Seminar and I probably knew less about social media than anybody else there. But my participation in that event is one of the things that has pulled more of my attention towards considering the real impact of this thing we call social media. This series of posts actually incorporates many of my comments from that seminar.
Social Media Formula? -gapingvoid
While I know little about social media, I do know a bit about social change, and that is really where the bulk of my work is. I help people better understand the nature of our communications, interactions, and relationships. I help groups identify and integrate the behaviors necessary to develop a culture able to take advantage of all of the individual and shared potential available. I am a social change agent. So I naturally have to wonder if social media will = social change. Will social media drive positive social change?
I am in my heart and in the marrow of my bones a question guy. I prefer a good question over an answer any day of the week. I think that answers are over-rated. And I believe…that we have a very real tendency to rush to answer without taking the time to make sure we are asking the right questions or the right kinds of questions. Questions can be powerful. I think that questions are to people and groups of people much like sunlight is to plants, they can determine the direction of our growth. Good questions, big questions, open-ended questions and overwhelming questions can determine the direction of our growth, the direction of our inquiry and what we pay attention to. It is the questions that we are willing and able to ask of ourselves that determine whether our answers are of any value.
We often do not ask these big questions. Sometimes we think it is not practical to ask the big questions or we just don’t have time for that stuff right now. So we function without real clarity on who we are and what we are here for. We take jobs, elect representatives and implement policy without a clear connection to what is really important.
And I would suggest to you that operating without this clarity, while relatively common is incredibly dangerous. Collectively and individually, when we live our lives and work our work without being relentlessly focused on our aspirations, our ideals…the things that are truly and profoundly important to us, we create a situation where we can acquire and apply all the tools, technology and tricks in the world to our lives and to our work without getting to where we want to go. We might actually be moving in the wrong direction altogether.
Efficiency, productivity, the power of the tools that we use, these things are only truly important and relevant if applied to the right context…if they are applied to getting us where we really want to go.
Social media is a set of tools. I would say it is a unique set of tools and a powerful set of tools, but still tools. Tools can be put to use in a lot of different ways. A hammer can be used to help build a house of worship and it can be used to inflict great physical violence on another human being. Tools can be of great value to us but only within the context of knowing who we are and where we are going.
Reflection on and consideration of what questions we are asking ourselves is of great importance regarding our implementation of social media, because if we simply rush forward and start twittering, blogging and creating without clarity on our real aspirations we are simply moving faster without knowing where we are and where we are going.
So.
I think that the question I started with (Social Media = Social Change?) requires us to start with a different question:
What do I want the world to be?
This has to be our first question, because it frames our direction. If we want to consider the role that social media can play in social change, we have to have some basic ideas of what kind of change we believe in. What is it that we want the world to be? Do we want world peace? Do we want safe playground equipment in our neighborhood? What is it that is truly and profoundly important to you?
Write it down…speak its name…say it out loud…make it real.
There are two ends of this stick. This question of our aspirations, if we are honest about our role in the world, comes with responsibility…it calls us to own our gift and consider a second question:
What am I willing to do to build the world that I want?
In truly considering these two foundational quesions we can have some clarity on who we are and what we are here for. And now we are ready to consider the what, why and how of the tools that we use.
I will attempt to dig into that in Part II.
be good to each other