During the past little while I have noticed my friends, coworkers, people on the bus and pretty much every kid walking the streets have become more and more addicted to the concept of social networking. Everyone has a Facebook page, msn account, chat account and a smart phone with unlimited data plan to follow all of the above. Every time I turn around one of my friends has his/her phone out, clicking away and chuckling about some dumb comment someone else left on their Facebook wall. I know I am probably the last person in US and Canada not to have a Facebook account, and according to my friends I don’t really exist until I exist on Facebook, but personally I neither enjoy for just about anyone one the WWW to have access to all of my info, nor do I think anything I do is interesting enough for others to follow. And honestly, I am surprised you are even reading this post right now.

The reason I am writing this post is that frankly I am FED UP with people talking about this whole concept of sitting alone on their phone clicking away on a keyboard that is microscopic with a screen that is even smaller social networking. I barely do this on my desktop, with an ergonomic keyboard and dual screens, let alone on my phone. I do understand the concept, which like any other theoretical concept is great and wonderful until bunch of board people get their hands on it and then it’s just ruined. The idea of social networking, Facebook, Twitter and all alike is to keep people in touch. People that do not have access to each other and that under normal circumstances wouldn’t be able to communicate. This was never intended for a bunch of people that see each other on daily basis and talk to each other face to face to share their thoughts on a blog page.

 Social networking gone wrong:

For the 4th of July weekend we went backpacking in the Olympic National Park. So here we are miles away from civilization, we have backpacked for miles, camped on the beach and now on a hike along the coast with some sceneries that we have never seen before. One of my friends (in the photo above) sat on the rocks by the beach, away from cell phone reception, writing entries on his blog to be saved on his phone and synced at a later time. Now don’t get me wrong, I paint, photograph and occasionally scribble a line or two and totally understand the creative process. You see something beautiful and fall in a state of total inspiration and you need to write about it, I get that. And knowing this guy, I believe he is writing about something interesting (don’t know yet what it is – haven’t read it, but it’s probably good), but my problem is that instead of hanging with the rest of the 6 people on the hike and sharing that thought with us, he decided to sit on a rock and click away so that in a week or so I could read about the thoughts that he had standing right next to me. I surely would have engaged in that conversation with him and enjoyed it too.

 Good application of social networking:

In June,the international attention was focused on the struggle of the Iranian youth with the regime. Now I don’t want to get into the whole political side of things, but the amazing thing was that they used social networking tools such as Twitter to their advantage, to a degree that it got dubbed the first Internet revolution. People tweeting about where the rallies are happening, who is there and what to avoid, literally saved lives of 100s of people. Whatever the outcome of the whole struggle was, the Iranian youth showed the world their faces. They fed the information internally and to the outside media, allowing their voices to be heard, in as little a time as they had. I think that’s where social networking truly becomes powerful and in a way essential.

Another one of the cool applications of Twitter I found was Etsy on Twitter. Etsy is a website where members can sell their hand crafted “things”, anything from handmade wedding invitations to a handmade fire pits. So getting your stuff on top of the list, getting people to notice your work is important. Etsy would publish the latest things that are posted on the site and if you follow their tweets you can find out about them quickly, sort of a new marketing strategy. (BTW, check out Etsy: http://www.etsy.com/ and their Twitter page http://twitter.com/etsy)

Now I know we all don’t have revolutions to fight and I am not saying stop posting your thoughts, articles and works online. All I am saying, next time you are sitting at a staff meeting at your job, with your manager and his manager, don’t pull out your phone and tweet about how you still wish you had more of those steak fries you had for lunch. There is a time and place for everything. I post this stuff too and I don’t really know if anyone would ever read this – by the way I’m really surprised you are- but I do it at a time that there is no other soul awake around me. I sit in front of my PC at 3 AM and write about things that have been pestering me for the past little while, sort of a rant if you would. I think the aspect of all of these amenities that the Internet can now provide to bring people closer and gets them to share their ideas and thoughts is absolutely amazing and mind boggling, but I don’t think most of us use it for good.

Listen, I AM a geek; I do spend 80% of my time in front of a PC screen. But when I have one or two other human beings around me, especially if they are my friends, I tend to just want to talk to them and exchange ideas, no matter how good or bad they are. But hey that’s just me …

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