Blog # 5 Social Media

Blog #5 Social Media

How do I love social media? Let me count the ways…

Mostly it’s a way of righting the social wrongs that have weighed heavy on my heart since the time that I could first start reading, investigating whether or not there were actually starving children in China like my parents said.

The most impacting video was the TED one. Gordon Brown did a lot for me in the reflecting of the impact social networking can do now as opposed to historically. As a Humanities concentrated/concerned student, I studied world history and despaired at the redundancy and repeated mistakes of the human race.

I went on to hate the reporters who had the audacity to share modern tragedies and miscarriages of cosmic justices with me through modern media when they knew by economy of scale, I was helpless to do anything to effect a positive change.

Rosa Parks, we heard about and read about.
Rodney King, we saw on video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROn_9302UHg

Brown shows us a picture of a girl 15 minutes from death and then as an adult spokeswoman. That is a powerful leap from a decade ago when that child would have been another anonymous statistic.

And now I’m feeling as though there is a solution to the equation that puts each member of the network into it. Now I’m feeling as though there is actual, productive power within a social network that doesn’t have to be the exchange of family photos, recipes, and dating services. All of those things are useful, but the transaction costs of interacting, inter- acting has become $0.

This is the amazing part of what I had envisioned decades ago. And it empowers me more, knowing what I can do now, and imagining what the possibilities may be within the next decades.

I used to bemoan the capitalistic, shallow, useless, boring times into which I was born. The renaissance, revolutions, social disobedience, all of these things my young mercenary heart longed for.

On Social disobedience http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qJ1feGOhho
On the Renaissance : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCYYD1jCzcc
On Revolution: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKFKGrmsBDk
On being a mercenary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kC2GzK7Aw4c

Now, decades later, how have I changed? I’ve spent some time exchanging recipes, family albums online, and chosen old-fashioned hook-up with one man for 26 years. But have I changed, or have I just been biding my time, waiting for the world to catch up with me?

It is the latter. And I am readying for the launch.