Mastering Social Media

Posted on 24 February 2010 | by JR Rozko

This is a blog post - a piece of social media. Social media is nothing new. Remember smoke signals? Social Media. Telegraphs? Social media. "Certainly not 8-track tapes?," you say. Oh yeah, definitely social media! Social media is a basic concept - it's a piece of information transferred to one or more people that can be interacted with in some way.

Now, as you take a look at the (potentially overwhelming) image in this post, you'd be quite justified in saying, "Come on JR, with 50 million tweets being published per day (600/ second!) you can't possibly mean to compare what we know as social media today with smoke signals and 8-tracks?" But you'd be wrong, I do mean to compare them - in at least one very important way. Mastery.

I don't mean getting really good at using them. How long would it take to become a good smoke signaler anyway? No, I mean mastering the amount of control they have over you. This is the dual-nature of every piece of social media ever invented, it does two things. In one sense it connects us to people and at the same time it disconnects us.

Imagine being there when someone realized that it might be possible to communicate via smoke signals. No longer would you have to stay together, you could travel over increasingly large distances and even live apart and still be able to communicate with one another. Connection - disconnection.

The same could be said for 8-track tapes. No longer do I have to attend concerts to hear my favorite bands perform. Not only that, I don't even have to sit listening to the radio. I control when I listen to the music I want to listen to with absolutely no relational connection to the performers or the larger fan base that enhances the dynamic of that relationship. Connection - disconnection.

Jump ahead to the social media you and I know today. Before we could even hope to count the various means of social media available to us, dozens more are created. The options for connecting to people are nearly limitless - yet so is the potential for disconnection.

So, to you, my bothers and sisters inundated along with me with all manner of social media, let us master it. Let us choose wisely those pieces of social media that connect us in helpful ways, but let us also be ever mindful of the power, often subtle if not altogether hidden, this social media has to distance and disconnect is from more tangible, more real, more human aspects of connection.