July 27th, 2009
I am well into a big fat love affair with Web 2.0.
For the sake of this post, I do not care what Web 2.0 and other associated buzzwords mean to you, only what they mean to me. The love affair started innocently enough many years ago, in a galaxy far, far away when I joined LinkedIn…after repeated invitations from one Jason Lauritsen. A few years later I would be a little quicker to jump on the Friendster bandwagon. I have stayed with LinkedIn, but Friendster and I went our separate ways long ago. A few years ago I started blogging, which was a pretty big step and nearly two years I stumbled across Twitter.
Today I spend a lot of time with social media and social networking tools, and am a big believer in their potential. I have even begun doing presentations and workshops oh why and how to put them to work. These tools are very valuable to me as an entrepreneur, they have helped me find and meet many wonderful and helpful people, and I think that these tools are potentially very valuable for the disciplines of diversity & inclusion, HR, OD, leadership development, facilitation, social justice, community building and education (which are the areas that I do most of my work with).
I love all the various tubes and pipes of Web 2.0 for what they allow me to do personally and professionally, but beyond that…
I truly do believe that these tools have the potential to help us drive revolutionary change in how we do business and how we do community…and how we do human relations period. Things like Twitter, Ning, Facebook, blogs, content sharing sites, bookmarking sites, etc. bring a lot of people together around a lot of different interests and provide us with the opportunity to interact in ways that are more inclusive, more transparent, more collaborative and more authentic. It is only an opportunity though, it still depends on how we use them.
Twitter, Ning and Facebook can all be used in non-inclusive, non-transparent, non-collaborative, non-authentic ways. The choice is still ours. It is a really big choice. This is all a really big deal. One of the great dangers is that we might lose this opportunity if we listen too closely to those that are screaming the most loudly about it…because there is a really big difference between change and transformation.
We are in danger of handing the exact same authority and power to a different group of people in the pursuit of transformation. Putting hipper, tech-savvy crowd in charge of the world is not any better than having the un-hip, captains of industry in charge of the world. It may be change, but it is not transformation. These hipper folks may look less dangerous. They may be very nice people. They may even have the best of intentions.
The problem is not with them, it is with human nature.
What these tools give us the opportunity to do is to actually diffuse power, rather than simply transfer power to a different cast of characters. If we are diffusing power, if we are putting real power (self-determination) in the hands of more people, we are doing something very real, and something that is actually transformational. If not, we are simply (sorry, I cannot help myself) putting new lipstick on the same old pig.
What do you see Web 2.0 doing in your industry / organization / community? Is it transferring power to a new set of decision makers (with cooler wardrobes and hybrid cars) or is empowering more people to make more of their own decisions? If we are not making things (business, school, government, community, The World) more transparent, inclusive, collaborative, and authentic, we are not actually doing anything new. Decisions might be made by different people, and we might be using different tools with more bells and whistles. But that is not nearly enough given the state of the world today and our potential to affect real change. That is not nearly enough.
Change and transformation are two very different things. Real transformation is possible with Web 2.0, not guaranteed. That choice is ours to make and I hope that we make it well.
Be good to each other.
Joe, you bring up an interesting point about real transformation. Social Media is not what is going to transform people, people need to transform in order to effect the change you are referring to. Social Media is just another tool that may or may not encourage inclusive and transparent behavior. Great post! Marguerite