Charles Dickens wrote the memorable line “it
was the best of times, it was the worst of times” in his epic novel ‘A
Tale of Two Cities’ in 1859. I am interpreting his words in 2014 and applying them to
social media and my love/hate
relationship with it. I know I am not alone…many of my friends and colleagues, young and old, feel the same way.
The genie was out of the bottle the day the first person popularized using the internet personally in
the early nineties. Until that point, the net (it wasn’t yet known as the “web”) was an
arcane, slow-speed hook-up for cerebral university professors collaborating on
research and, to some extent, the United States military. Everyday
people like you and me became the beneficiaries of a remarkably powerful
communications tool and a range of users and developers recognized that and set out to harness the
internet, coming up with grand ideas…Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn are just some of the best known sites in terms of daily usage. But individual and
corporate web presence also assumed huge importance in essential ‘one-to-many’ personal
communications, marketing, advertising, and news. And it was and is completely
interactive. Dickens would probably have called it magic.
I’ve spent the
vast majority of my life in communications-related businesses. Radio broadcasting,
TV, telephone/internet sales and service, just to name a few. In
these businesses, a level of professionalism, proper language, decorum,
and legality were absolute musts. Technically, all of these elements of polite exchange should
have simply glided into the various internet-based apps most of us use to
communicate, but that didn’t happen.
Now, YouTube
gives anyone who avails himself of it, a private, worldwide TV station. You don’t
need a broadcasting license anymore to create radio that can be heard around the globe. Twitter
lets anybody say whatever he or she pleases about anything with virtually no threat of recourse. Facebook does the
same, but on a vastly expanded scale as, unlike Twitter, there are no limitations on size of post. Arguments about one’s right to hold any
opinion abound…no one believes their own opinion could possibly be a stupid one…and so, we are bombarded by millions of words every day written by the uninformed (I use that word only to be gentle!). I’ve
developed several specific approaches for how and when I use social media, just to avoid viewing all the nonsense.
First, birthdays aside, I don’t ever put personal information on line. Second, I
work hard to suppress emotional responses to the garbage out there...I often
tweet back and then nuke my answers before ever pressing ‘send’. And
finally, I monitor only the people I choose to and I block the idiot fringe. I
just keep visualizing the staggering number of strangers who can and do look at everything
and have a burning need to comment, regardless of what they know (or don't!) about any given subject.
What prompted
me to think about and address this now is the sweeter side of social media.
I felt great warmth yesterday as literally hundreds offered me heartfelt birthday greetings;
a pat on the back; a word of encouragement; or a positive acknowledgement of
something I’d once done. I posted a thank-you that said in part:
“You
took a moment to send greetings or just make a nice comment. So, I think that
the quid-pro-quo for getting older is the great good fortune of having all of
the people who are or ever have been in my life out there. It is your interest and your
friendship, sometimes your challenges, and always your affection that make me
look forward to the next birthday...hopefully, interspersed with exchanges and
get-togethers with many of you for no reason at all other than because we want
to.”
Now
that is the social part of social media. It allows the privilege of ‘one-to-many’ communication in a sincere way. It
reflects an aspect of personal contact often absent from daily life and it
informs my Dickens quote applying to social media as sometimes being part of “the best of
times”. Be well everyone…and use this amazing tool wisely.
Peter
Peter