Everyone seems to think that social media is a great leap forward. The collective unconscious now brims with the wisdom that social media is a keystone, marking a new dawn whereby the marriage of technology, personal expression, business necessity and community will finally flower, unimpeded by the forces of reaction.
The first internet boom saw day-trading grandmothers and pimple-faced millionaires. The second internet boom–the social media boom–promises higher ideals than an entire nation getting fake-rich quick. This boom is the real one. The one where everyone gets what they want.
- Businesses get their customers
- Brands get their “equity”
- Bloggers get their readers
- Politicians get their legislation
- Journalists get their story
- Marketers do whatever it is marketers do (I’m still fuzzy on this one)
OK so perhaps the world won’t be so perfect as all that. But I do think that there is one major misconception with the above conjecture. Social media is less a giant leap forward than a calculated step back.
A step back
- in rebuilding personal relationships
- in solidifying the frayed ties that bind our communities
- in reconnecting businesses with their customers
- in reclaiming our democracy
- in controlling more of our own lives
One of the earliest memories of I have of total and complete powerlessness was in the mid to late 90′s and, of course, it involves a cable company. (I could easily have told you a story about childhood, which in many ways is defined by powerlessness, but its not relevant here) At the time, and to this day, Time Warner Cable of New York was the primary cable company in Manhattan. You simply didn’t have a choice. You could either live without cable, or you signed up and submitted yourself to all manner of indignities. Terrible and nearly non existent customer service, ridiculous wait times, incompetent technical support, inflated bills, etc..
I remember being without cable, and for a near-total introvert, video-game, TV and movie-addicted adolescent, there was no more sheer torture than the cable going out. And Time Warner thought so little of their customers, and many would argue still don’t, that they had clearly calculated that they could invest as little in possible in fixing their customer’s problems, without it ever getting out. All those lit up households in New York City, all those people sitting on their couch’s decompressing from their whirlwind days, seemingly disconnected from one another, unaware of the trials and tribulations present in the next apartment building over. And here I was, a single soul in a sea of humanity, and my pain was mine alone. I could not and did not share it with anyone. The only entity I could share it with was…Time Warner Cable. And they didn’t care.
I first realized the power of social media when I realized that people were expressing their frustrations, looking for lifelines, looking for support for the pain they felt or the problems they perceived. We used to have those support systems. Our society, the entire Western World was built on community. On their being steam valves so that people didn’t literally tear each other apart.
Robert Putnam called this “social capital” in his landmark book, “Bowling Alone.” Bear in mind that the book was published in the year 2000 when reading this quote:
Putnam draws on evidence including nearly 500,000 interviews over the last quarter century to show that we sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and even socialize with our families less often. We’re even bowling alone.
And yet, every time our nation has faced this exact predicament, we’ve had a restoration. We’ve had a period of intense civic engagement that has reset the all important cultural institutions that bind us to one another. In short, we now know who else is suffering from our lack of cable TV. And as silly as that sounds, when you know you aren’t the only one who is without TV tonight, or who feels intimidated by a telecommunications company, or whose complaints and letters to their Senator or Congressman go unanswered, or a thousand other ways in which the people of this nation have allowed themselves to be abused, it is connective. It is the connective tissue of our society to be able to bitch and moan in unison. Because a community that complains is also one that celebrates.
Right now I think its clear that Americans have been abused. That we’ve allowed ourselves to be abused with our apathy, and our disinterestedness and our unwillingness to keep our communities strong. Or even to know what our communities are and where they might be found. But don’t get me wrong, this isn’t some naive call to action. I’m far too old (turning 30 next month) to blindly believe that all our ills can be cleverly managed.
All I am saying to you now is that social media doesn’t need to be some great leap forward in human progress. It doesn’t need to be a fad, a trend, a bubble. It can, should and WILL be something far more important. It will be the force that reconnects our lives, our cities and towns, our culture as a whole, to the things that really matter. Each other.
