Kudos to social networks, for what it's worth

I still love to read the Doonesbury comic strip.  The recent lampoon of the so-called journalist using Twitter to keep in touch with fans has been fairly pointed and fun.

One recent episode had the journalist tweeting about his shower and other banal things, with an overline of a delighted character reading his tweets that reads, "Tweets for Twits."

Twitter is really an easy technology to criticize, and in some ways so are most of the social networks out there such as Facebook.  (I use both, and others, but not a lot.)  But when I see young adults using these new ways of communicating, I get that pang of the technology optimist that I am really am underneath.

I think of how so many people thought it was pointless to send people to the Moon and the way the Wright Brothers laboriously reshaped thousands of pieces of wood that later became wings capable of providing lift for airplanes. They had their critics, but they had vision and a dream.

I think of Twitter as something like that starting point, really.  It is 140 characters, but much more.  An editor at Computerworld, Ken Mingis, laughingly said that Twitter is leading us on a pathway toward short messaging that is only one letter long, adding, "and I claim the letter G."  

He is onto something.  We are seeing a revolutionary change in communication, or at least a big deal, if not revolutionary.  The change means we don't see online audiences as committed to traditional journalism, with the pyramid structure and the five W's in the lead paragraph.  It means old-fashioned writers quickly have to decide what is really important and say it pretty darn fast.

I recently heard of a headmaster at a private school in the Washington area bemoaning the use of text messaging by students, saying it is leading to a generation of young people who don't plan ahead and use planners and agendas, preferring instead to act on the spur of the moment, just because they are instantly connected.  Yes, put that way, it doesn't sound like the kind of technology a society would favor.

On the other hand ... the optimist inside me says that we really need to look at what the students and other early adopters are doing.  For example, my daughter, 15, can almost instantly reach out to her friends to ask questions about her homework in a text from her cell phone.  She's not using Twitter, but it's similar.

She does it mid-stream, from her homework perch, without walking to the PC or a wall phone.  She has some close friends, the kind who she talks to several times a day, who don't need a formal phone call with the "hello, how are you?" starting point.  She gets to the point this way, the same way that co-workers involved in a series of tasks might interact.

In her case, it is highly meaningful discourse at times, peppered with nonsense, of course.  

I can use myself as an example.  When the inaugural events occurred, several Web news outlets were proposing sending video streams over the Internet that a person could reach wirelessly even. I monitored some of these feeds from my laptop wirelessly during the President Obama swearing in, and got updates on other sites than I could not monitor from other Twitter users.  

A group of us were following the same thing on Twitter, and some  of us were able to report problems on various sites. I would get a short but valuable comment that X was now feeding video after a long wait, etc.  I was able to follow-up some of the concerns, and made the valuable (if not fairly obvious) discovery that while my video reception might have been down, many others might have been fine.  In that case, other information from outside monitoring groups who actually look at Internet performance on a grand scale became more important. And while a big picture is useful, the tweets from associates and total strangers, gave me the little picture--small but valuable.

Another personal example comes to mind.   Long ago, I filled out my Facebook profile and, half-thinking, included my birthdate.  I have gone for years sort of hoping nobody in my work place or the outside work world would ever again congratulate me for getting older. It just had become a bad reminder of aging, in a sense. So I arrived at work that fateful day recently and started getting emails from almost total strangers who somehow I had allowed to be friends in Facebook wishing me 'Happy Birthday.'  One person fairly close, my sister-in-law who lives near Los Angeles about 3,000 miles from me, wished me Happy Birthday.  

She is of course in a group of friends who includes my daughter, who noticed and informed the rest of my family.  They quickly organized a party and really surprised me when I got home from work.  It felt good, and somehow that dumb Facebook profile had pried me out of my reluctance to celebrate my own birthday. I even said thanks to the near-strangers.  It reminded me that my nephew had recently sent me a note on Facebook asking about a G1 phone I had written about, and when I went to his Facebook wall, I discovered in his profile that he was engaged.  I was one of the first to discover this fact, and being first still matters in journalism.

I am not sure I can correlate these experiences to more serious directions that technology has taken in our culture.  In a way, it doesn't matter.  Our top editor made a fairly remarkable comment that stuck with me: we don't know if Twitter is media or if it is another form of communication.  Good point.  I'm keeping an open mind about it and trying to get as much value from the technology that I can.

A final story might be valuable to share.  At a recent church council meeting, we were discussing long-term plans to reorganize the church bylaws and the way official work gets done.  A young father at my brainstorming session, who has a daughter the same age as my daugher, said that she was not able to attend all the confirmation meetings and was not as connected to the other confirmands as she would like to be because the bulk of them went to a different high school from hers.  But he noted that she made up for the separation, in part, by joining Facebook friends from the confirmand group.  They were able to virtually share many things that helped create a better community, he said.  

As a result, he asked the church to consider ways to adapt to social networks as important in helping create the valuble communities the church thrives upon.  It might well be a word to the wise in other non-profit organizations like the YMCA or even the local bar or social club that seeks to keep communities engaged in the virtual world as well as the physical world.

We hear a lot about community on the Web, and that might be the essence of what matters with social networks.  So it seems that form and format in communication becomes less critical than the coveted element of creating and sustaining a community.  It is why abbreviations are acceptable, like BFF and LOL. (And personally, I'm glad to know those abbreviations.)

I think maybe these early adopters are seeing how critical a community can be, especially as the world dumps more and more information on our heads every day.  The young adopters might not be forming the skills to plan with an agenda that the headmaster wants, but they are building the relationships, arguably, that are highly meaningful in getting things done.  It's not a repudiation of what has gone before, but really an exciting appreciation of what's new.  

Who can't use a little technology optimism?