A longer post about the ‘Life Options’ class I took this week will be coming, but I wanted to share an anecdote from today with you now.
I very often forget that I am in the fraction of a percentage of people in the world who is this connected online. Because my ‘network’ has been with others who are at the same place or are even MORE interconnected, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that there are really smart people out there who have never heard of Twitter and think Facebook is for the kids.
I was looked at as a bit of an oddity in my class today, not because of the usual reasons (me just being strange or wanting to write for TV, which by itself is enough to make me stick out in some settings), but because I was a social media evangelist. I knew so damn much about how to navigate the waters of the online world — certain websites to use, RSS readers, social networking, etc. that it was like I had run into the street shouting “Soylent Green is made of people!!” Yeah, it was weird.
The irony of being on the edge of social media/online content/etc is that you tend to be surrounded by those same people, forgetting the millions of others who are still just using the internet to check their email and read Yahoo news. A few might be really edgy and have a LinkedIn profile or read blogs, but amazingly the number of pepole doing this is pretty small, given what I perceived was the case.
So, while I might say something here on the blog that the rest of you roll your eyes and think ‘yeah, yeah, we’ve heard all this already,’ I am reminded that I’m not just talking to you. I’m talking to the person who might stumble across my virtual space googling around for things or following a link here, who HAS NO IDEA WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT.
So, if I sound repetitive about some things, forgive me. To me, Twitter is old hat. I signed up over two years ago and used it while at Comic Con when I had about 12 followers. Now everyone in the world ’seems’ to be on Twitter and going to Comic Con, which, of course, isn’t true…just a lot of the people in my social network are doing that now.
Oh and don’t get me started on having to explain Comic Con to some people…
Posted under randomness
This post was written by Shawna on July 16, 2009
I work at a university. Full of smart people. Surprising how few of them make the most of social networking. There truly is a perception that much of it is for the kids.
Of course, anyone who thought they’d give MySpace a try probably, and understandably, was horrified and swore off social networking forever.
I think that social networking…wait a minute…Soylent Green is made of WHAT?!?!
I remember a couple of months ago when a couple of people in my old writers group started asking each other if they’d heard of something I had heard about months before and assumed everybody knew about.
That’s when I realized how much more connected I was because of the blogosphere.
I don’t care what you say — I still don’t get Twitter.
Shawna Benson is so cutting-edge. And a brainiac too.
You bring up a good point that is helpful to be mindful in all of our interactions & discussions online, and that’s that these things have a long future life. Even if we’re somewhat a head of the curve right now, the posts that you make now will have a future life and may be valuable to others in the future as well.