Tag: social networking

Social networking – a shared anxiety

What I want is to be creative. I want the tools to serve me, not the other way around.

I’m getting absolutely nothing significant done, but I’m supposedly “busy” all the time. And it’s all driven by a shared anxiety: if we don’t keep up, we’ll be left behind; if we don’t flock over here with the Crowd, we’ll lose our audience and no one will talk to us or listen to us anymore.

We’re not so sure they’re listening now…maybe we’d better issue another Tweet or Post or Dent and make sure they’re there.

(Source: cassandrapages.com)

Nunca más acompañados, ni más solos

¿A cuánta gente estamos dejando de conocer ahora que tenemos a todo el mundo al alcance de un clic? Nunca hemos estado más conectados, y desconectados. Nunca hemos tenido más amigos, y menos. Nunca hemos sabido de tantas personas, tan poco.

En el mundo virtual que he creado soy simpático, me lo paso en grande, viajo a lugares fascinantes y tengo cientos de amigos a quienes al parecer gusta lo que hago, quizá porque ya no tienen que hacer el esfuerzo de decírmelo. Basta con un clic.

Internet nos permite presentar una versión mejorada de nosotros mismos. La cuidamos cada día, la exponemos en el escaparate virtual y esperamos que se paren a admirarla. ¿Por qué arriesgarse a ponerla bajo la prueba del contacto directo y real?

Nunca estuvimos más acompañados. Ni más solos.

via davidjimenezblog.

Six degrees of Jeff

Lois is a type — a particularly rare and extraordinary type, but a type nonetheless. She’s the type of person who seems to know everybody, and this type can be found in every walk of life. Someone I met at a wedding (actually, the wedding of the daughter of Lois’s neighbors, the Newbergers) told me that if I ever went to Massapequa I should look up a woman named Marsha, because Marsha was the type of person who knew everybody. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the word is that a tailor named Charlie Davidson knows everybody. In Houston, I’m told, there is an attorney named Harry Reasoner who knows everybody. There are probably Lois Weisbergs in Akron and Tucson and Paris and in some little town in the Yukon Territory, up by the Arctic Circle.

We’ve all met someone like Lois Weisberg. Yet, although we all know a Lois Weisberg type, we don’t know much about the Lois Weisberg type. Why is it, for example, that these few, select people seem to know everyone and the rest of us don’t? And how important are the people who know everyone?

My Lois is a guy called Jeff. Read this New Yorker piece for more on six degrees of separation