'A quick smile and a strong drink'
David Forbes, our correspondent in Asheville NC, reflects on the 'social' aspect of social media
“This is your city, take over your city”
It's a Saturday night in Asheville, a small city in Western North Carolina, and one whose populace makes heavy use of social media. The man speaking is Tim Smith, and he's addressing the roughly 50 attendees of the first Drinks and Dialogue, this particular event focused on the controversial issue of the city's racial relations and cultural segregation. The conversation is energetic, but humorous and polite.
In years past, such a gathering would have been brought together through word of mouth or a flyer. While personal communication played a role in gathering this group together, the primary driver was social media. Smith, well-known locally on Twitter, used his contacts to bring together a diverse variety of social circles and further connect them, in person.
After the discussion breaks up, people around the room take out their Blackberrys and iPhones and begin to add people they've just met to their Twitter and Facebook accounts, so they can further communicate. Smith, with some others, even signs up some of the attendees for Twitter and informs them how to join the larger conversation if they're not familiar with the tool yet.
Conversations about social media usually focus on the “media” end: what a new platform offers, how many bells and whistles it has, who's using it. The above event illustrates an interesting and often un-remarked on aspect of our changing world: the “social” end of that spectrum.
Increasingly, social media fulfills the social function of icebreaking, allowing people to assess if someone's interesting and getting enough of the small talk out of the way to decide that they want to know them better. Sometimes, that's as far as it goes.
But, if one person lives in the same town as another, or goes nearby on a trip, the opportunity exists to deepen that connection. I've been amazed at how social media makes just enough of a connection to get an offer of a place to stay, a drink or dinner. What was once electronic becomes personal. And that personal connection, instead of diminishing without more face to face meetings, will continue as messages are exchanged.
It goes further than that. In a previous generation, contact had to be maintained through letters and the occasional long-distance phone call, something that meant social circles usually narrowed after a set period in life. One had teenage friends, college friends, work friends from Job A, Job B, etc. However, most of those faded when that particular period of life was over, with perhaps one or two exceptions.
I remember my mother, for example, keeping one friend from college, who lived across the state. They interacted perhaps once every other month, through one of the aforementioned old school methods. Perhaps once a year, money allowing, they would make a trip across North Carolina to see the other. Her situation wasn't atypical.
Flash forward and the situation for a new generation could not be more different.
It's not uncommon to talk to friends from all periods of life at least once a week, and to retain more of them over the years, often without much face to face contact. This means that instead of fading, old social circles now stay relatively intact for years. The basic way we communicate and how many compatriots we keep over the course of our lives just drastically changed.
At the risk of hyperbole, but the social side of social media might end up compelling one of the biggest changes in how the average social circle functions since increasing urbanization and cultural changes broke up extended families into smaller, more individualized bits.
This isn't always welcome (“So-and-so I couldn't stand from High School managed to find me on Facebook” is a common lament) and it does mean that people's previous identities become harder to shake. Now there will be records of every awkward step along the way, and it will no doubt take some time for the culture to adapt. Most people aren't entirely comfortable with their various life phases being subject to public scrutiny.
But it also offers some interesting opportunities. Social circles less based on location broaden the potential reach of each person's life and ideas. It means that residence in a particular metropolis is less important than it used to be for social connectivity and career prospects.
And it can increase the ability to rally people together for a given cause, everything from a serious political issue to throwing a party. Perhaps events such as flash-mobs presaged something increasingly common: the ability of people, without any special influence or clout, to acquire enough contacts to pull together people from a number of social circles for a given goal (even an inane one).
Of course, people still love face to face contact, something that many a tech guru, in failing to understand the primal appeal of human socialization has missed. I think events like Drinks and Dialogue presage something we'll probably see more of: new media providing a starting point, and people making that media social through ancient, immortal methods like a quick smile and a strong drink.
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About
David Forbes realized very young that he wanted to know everything. He also realized that he derived sincere enjoyment from taking things -- personalities, ideas, symbols, events, social systems -- apart to see how they worked -- and how they could change. He writes for a living as a journalist, with side stints as an impromptu editor or agent, occasionally paid. He also writes fiction, poetry and general thoughts, rarely paid.”
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