It is deceptively easy: Walk into one of Crested Butte’s many fine watering holes and plop down on a barstool. Make sure stools on either side are vacant and inviting to other networkers who might share your thirst. Signal the bartender and order a beer; when you pay, leave a generous tip. Now simply wait for someone to follow your lead, buy them a drink and strike up a conversation. Welcome to social networking.
Such intercourse is deceptive because its consequences can be anything but easy. Social networking facilitated by PBR or Jack Daniels often leads to circumstances that quickly become complicated. Sometimes, for example, you get tangled in a network from which tomorrow morning you want to extricate yourself as quickly as possible. If you drive your car, it can lead to social networking in the Graybar Hotel.
While I practiced this thirst-quenching method of social networking for years, its inherent complications finally took their toll and forced me to seek other means of social interaction. Not surprisingly, even in a socially inbred place like Crested Butte, that proved a challenge. Luckily, and just short of becoming a cynical recluse, enter the internet.
It probably started with email, instantaneous communication that doesn’t generate writer’s cramp or require a trip to the post office. You can use shorthand, and misspellings are easily forgiven. Furthermore, if you don’t want to communicate right now, wait until tomorrow. If you don’t want to communicate at all, hit delete.
Like most things internet, technology quickly outpaced the normal progress of human communication. Social networking came into its own with virtual innovations like MySpace and YouTube, networks now so-last-year with evolution of Facebook, Twitter and Qik. Instantaneous news became fodder for wannabe pundits to blog and comment, to toss their two cents into any old hat, to vent vitriol, and express opinions informed or otherwise.
One decidedly informed writer is Joshua-Michèle Ross of O’Reilly Media writing at Forbes.com. Ross describes, “The Rise of the Social Nervous System,” the internet as transformative communications network and foundation of society, business and government. Which he demonstrates, is exactly where we’re at: 1.6 billion people connect with computers, 3 billion use internet mobile devices…cell phones and the rest.
Ross works in the rarified atmosphere of something called Web 2.0, a next generation internet only hinted at by today’s innovations. According to Ross, all that connectedness is a “social nervous system that makes us aware of a broader context of relationship with humanity…Even a kid with a mobile phone can capture a revolution.”
Importantly, Ross credits the social nervous system with helping coordinate action from human input; for example, posting current events on Twitter. “Using a social nervous system,” writes Ross, “we are finding solutions to some big problems such as controlling disease or responding to emergencies. Most important, we are creating a feedback mechanism that exposes the actions of a powerful few to the many—and the trivial day-to-day life of the many to the whole of humanity.”
Ross suggests the social nervous system promotes a healthier balance of power, adding that assumed inalienable rights to privacy are forfeit. “Those who do not connect share and collaborate will have a hard time in business and in social life…Given the complexity and precarious position of the modern world, getting people to genuinely reach out and touch their neighbors is a good thing but it will come at the price of reshaping our identities as part of a larger, interconnected whole.”
Early on, my first thought was: Who on earth wants to be jacked into the “trivial day-to-day life” of the interconnected whole anyway? Isn’t life complicated enough? So not without certain irony did I get my comeuppance in the social network of Facebook; one friend calls it “FaceButte.” The irony is that a multitude of real-life, brick-and-mortar Crested Butte friends uses internet social networking to communicate, wish each other happy birthday and discuss what time to go skiing. And hell, it isn’t trivial at all.
Right about here, I can sense your eyes glazing over; computer stuff does that. Perhaps it’s time to go sit on the bench in the sun, or maybe you should go get that beer.
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