Several of my recent posts have been a little afield of what I normally talk about, and yet, they relate very directly to what we’re all working on. If you’re blogging, podcasting, navigating Twitter and Facebook, you’re working in and amongst the things I’m discussing. You’re using these tools, and you’re contributing to this sculpture. The question is this: have you given much thought to “how” and “why” you’re using these things? If so, keep reading.
Social Media is Messy
If you consider all the various ways we are creating connections in social media, most of them are redundant, and yet, they serve different purposes. We tweet; we seesmic; we blog; we use Facebook; and we do a lot of this in non-linear, asynchronous fashion. We make ‘friends’ who aren’t really friends, but we don’t have a word for it. We “meet” people online long before we meet them in person, and we have to come up with ways to explain our Internet friends.
The information we can gather from these experiences is useful, and yet not much of it needs storing. It’s stuff we need to make something happen, but not always stuff we need to know.
Messy Like Life
How do you know a sandwich tastes good? Now, how do you know your sandwich will taste good to me? Information, and how we use it, is all messy. Senses and the real world are messy. You’ve probably heard it before, but there’s a great line about walking: “Walking is a series of controlled falls.” If you consider all the senses it takes to successfully navigate even three steps, it’s baffling. Life is FULL of these loose threads of information.
Consider this: if you gave a seven-year-old five dollars and sent them out the door to the local grocery store for a dozen eggs and a pound of butter, how many judgments would have to be made between the time she left for the store and when she came back? Where would the information come from? How much of it would she process and discard? How much would she use only in the moment? How much would be stored forever?
Life Yields More Life
2007 has been the year that taught us all the tools. We have learned to navigate through creating podcasts and videoblogs and blogs. We have used Facebook and Twitter and Utterz and Pownce and Jaiku and Seesmic. We understand how to communicate, or we’re learning all this through our daily practice of using the tools. So next is the evolution. It’s the birthing process (something else that’s messy). Where does this go? I’m thinking that we evolve what we’ve learned over this year into something that we start to raise, and cultivate and teach.
What if we’re all parents of a messy life form of sorts? What if this is our own spore project made in real time and out of parts of our own human/socialmedia DNA?
How You Can Use This
Look PAST what it is you’re doing today with these things. Look past creating blog posts and making social media. Consider what it feels like to move inside a system, a system that you’ve helped create. NOW, think about the things you might want this system to do, were it a little more “alive.” You’d want it to sense the world around it. You’d want it to communicate, to touch, to react, and as it grew better, to act as part of a society. Just like you’d hope for a child.
What do we need next? School for our thing? A job? Ahhh. Hmmm.
Totally Off the Wall?
The point of all this thinking and what-iffing and wondering aloud to a group of people who are no doubt shrugging or clicking past me by now is just this: we are creating something more than the individual bits of information that we spill out into the Internet. It’s ours to shape, to make into larger, more meaningful, more impactful things. But we have to think of it in those ways first to do so.
Part of my Inspiration for This Post
If you want something really interesting, check out David Weinberger’s keynote at the recent Defrag conference. (Super big hat tip to Mr. Mitch Joel, social media godfather). Weinberger talks about the way the Internet is counter to the age of computers. It’s the explicit (data) versus the implicit (links and crazy mixes of things that don’t fit simply).
And I promise that around 10AM, there’ll be some kind of tip you can use for your blogging or branding or whatever, which will feel much more salient to some of you.
Photo credit, ebmorse