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Just do it: connecting in a brave new world
As this year comes to a close—and dare I say it, folks are all atwitter trying to wrap things up—I keep thinking back on how many times this past year I’ve been asked to explain social media, with all its iterations, to friends and family, young and old.
The best advice I can offer is to just do it… try it… get your feet wet. As with anything new and a little bit foreign, the best way to understand is to immerse yourself and see what it’s all about. I remember watching a Charlie Rose interview with Evan Williams, one of the founders of Twitter, more than a year ago. I was fascinated but couldn’t quite get my mind wrapped around it, so I logged on, signed up, and tried a tweet. The same thing happened with Facebook—and now I feel as if the surf is at least up to my ankles.
In a related vein, my 83-year-old father has long thought this whole Internet thing silly, but mostly because it’s a foreign language to him. But about a month ago, when he and my 20-year-old nephew were at a college basketball game, they happened upon a question about sports trivia that neither could readily answer. So my nephew launched Google on his iPhone and had the answer within a minute. Suddenly, my father was both perplexed and intrigued. Now that I’m home for the holiday, he keeps asking to borrow my iPhone, mostly to go to espn.com to get late-breaking scores, but also checking out news and weather sites, among others (and he even navigated to Facebook, where he got to see my nephew’s birthday wish for him).
I could see it in his eyes, and it made me wonder what marvels I will be anxious about forty years from now.
If social media is about new ways of connecting, the surest way to make sense of it all is to just plug in and go. You’ll soon find yourself in new and fascinating places. And if my father can do it, so can you.
See you in cyberspace in 2010, where maybe we’ll both read my father’s first tweet.
Categories Digital Media, Outside the Square
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