How I think Social Media Should be Used

The "Mob"

Whenever I hear the "Mob," I think of Italian guys in slick suits and sleek hair.  To begin writing this post and engaging with the material, I got a third of the way through This, That and the Other, but like many consumers of digital material, became bored with it.  Then once I realized how much longer I had to read and admitted how uninterested I was in the rant Mr. Pesce was on, I decided I had to stop reading. 

What I did find interesting in the first third that I read was the evolution of mass communication.  During my BA studies I was required to take Mass Communications and when we discussed the current state of constant communication, the instructor asked what would happen if we did not have these various forms of mass communication.  He followed up with the "does a fish know it's wet?" question, which threw most of the class into a debate over whether or not fish could know if they were wet and I am pretty sure someone asked about the tree falling in the woods making a sound if no one was there to hear it.

But, the point was that as humans, for so long, since we could communicate, reaching people with our communication has been essential to our daily lives and survival.  With every new way to communicate we wonder how we lived before it was in our life.  I think that is one of the reasons so many people fear social media - that they will get so sucked in and not be able to remember what it was like to have face to face communication.  Even I had (have?) this fear.  For example, for many reasons I am not a fan of Facebook.  One of them is that I don't need a place to post my every activity and photograph for people to like or tag or whatever.  The people I care about were probably with me when I had a blast, and if not they are in my cellphone and I can call them. 

I prefer to use social media and engage with online communities learn something from other like-minded and maybe some not-like-minded people.  To me, social media is at its' best when it connects those of us who would otherwise never connect.  This workshop group and the participants are an example.  After reading through everyone's introduction, I already found some new people to follow on Twitter who I could share information with, more than, "Hey, check out how many beers I drank last Saturday!"

At the risk of already lost my readers because I myself went on a rant, I will end with my personal opinion that social media is truly at its' best when we use it to connect for a meaningful experience.  The content of what we learn from one another is irrelevant.  What matters is that we are exposed to more than what our location limits us (physically) to and are inspired and motivated by others all over the world.