Are we really in a more 'social' world or we have just taken a collective fancy for this word?
What made me think about this topic is not another one of my social media consulting projects for a small business in a developing country or a NetImpact project for a nonprofit, or a class presentation for Management of Technology class. I stand guilty of exploiting the same topic –voluntarily & involuntarily in all the above cases to get my grades or make my resume meatier. There is so much interesting content on this topic freely available over the internet that it just seems the easiest choice for a lazy ass to become subject matter expert (SME). SME is a sly chide that you get when you sell the same stuff over & over again but the trick is to still have a new feather up your sleeve in every eventuality.
If the PowerPoint presentations were not already enough, the Facebook IPO caused a furor over news media. You could just gape at how all that buzz and hoopla could translate into exorbitant figures. Much worse it was the only dinner topic discussion in my section of the society- young men-women living on a student loan on foreign shores (US) battered by a dismal stock exchange (India) and betting on the IPO tanking eventually.
So now when all this dust has finally settled, I decided I wanted to revisit the topic once again. I wanted to look at the whole social media/social-networking/business from a anthropological viewpoint. Not long ago we lived in an age where knowledge was more monopolist and private than open source. This statement may still hold true about big scientific discoveries, but I am talking about experiential knowledge- from kitchen, from garage, from camping tent from activities ranging from music, photography, dramatics, writing, singing, dancing to almost anything under the sun we are sharing our compositions, our recipes, our tips more freely and learning all the more. Has technology created the 'germ' of sharing or we always had this germ latently present in our system? I choose to repeatedly use the word germ, as some people get so affected that their private lives are not just the plain vanilla 'open book' but annoyingly jazzy 'face book' (pun intended).
Why do we share? I would acquiesce with someone who puts his finger on the intellect but I would argue that we share for emotional reasons. I write the blog to share my thoughts but I also have my eyes on the view statistics, on the comments and on the list of followers. My blog is another way of conversation for me, and I like the dialogue. Again when I sit down to prepare marketing content for the company I am interning with, I am just not thinking about content, I have to think about building associations. I have to try to relate to the end customers, not in an emotional soapy sense but in an open sharing way. So we share because we are philanthropic and believe in enriching ourselves by learning and sharing. We share because it gives us an ego-boost, it makes us feel important. We share because ultimately we want to sell, and sharing is a way to build trust. Men & women always have a reason; we rarely do anything without reason. (This can become a new blog post).
Then again sharing can go viral. Is it an expression of our long lost tribal instinct to rally around something? If so then this instinct already existed and technology merely facilitated it. Animals also strongly exhibit this attribute, ever woken up in the middle of night and observed how one barking dog gets the entire community barking and yes you can bid adieu to sweet sleep for at least next half an hour. Yes all things viral (and barking) die out eventually to give you back your peace of mind. However these brief moments of glory sometimes define entire lifetimes. And yes we are such anomalies sometimes we take ages to build certain associations and sometimes we just clock million likes within a couple of hours/minutes(whatever!)
To sum up, man is inherently social and is always seeking (monetary/emotional/intellectual) interactions. Technology has merely facilitated this inherent need. However this facilitation cannot be qualified as unobtrusive and non-intrusive, it has altered the existing social models of communication, business and even day to day interactions. I cannot bet on the success or the longevity of the current system but the inherent need will always create different media, new models and new ecosystems and we will have to adapt and evolve correspondingly.
