The Social Stream is a mindfield of information, but is the information healthy?
I am tired of the lists!
I am tired of the stream of stuff.
Is that all you have got to pull me into your net?
Lists to tell me what? How to do this, how to do that, when, where, why, who and how all rolling around the stream like they meant something.
They could mean something!
Instead they mean link bait, and I’m no fish, and I know you aren’t either.
Come on you darling of the digital age, give me more than this. Surely you have something to offer other than the trotted out tried and sometimes true LIST!
What would I like instead?
Insights that let me see, and then let me consider.
Sign posts of value.
Show me that you have thought a little.
Now it’s not all bad, I think.
There are people who rip up the script and dance a little with the rest of us.
But, then they think something is wrong with them, because they aren’t one of the darlings. Because they don’t get the linklove, or whatever love it is that they are looking for.
Money.
Fame.
Membership.
Notoriety.
If that is all this is about, get me outah here!
I know that it isn’t.
How?
A Conversation using the tools instead of serving them.
Because I talked with a most interesting person yesterday. A person who lived and worked in China. I am so keen to learn about the experiences, the little things, the stand out things that will last him a lifetime.
This is the spark of the digital connection. The conversation that allows you to go beyond the usual. I am sure that we will hear from this young man. He has the experience to tell all of us so much about the way of China. He has done it for a decade, lived and worked in the hotlands of the thrust and parry of the wildest culture on this earth.
I am lucky to have made the connection, and even lucker to be able to keep this connection going. Yet he and I share one thing right outah the gate. The digital darlings of the x’s and o’s stream are causing us to doubt?
Even if it’s only for a moment. Glad to be able to connect and dispel the way things are presented and can see that each conversation like the one we have begun is the stuff of change.
I know that if you forget the digital darlings and search you will find anything you really want.
This is Alice’s Restaurant and Arlo’s still looking for his pickle! Things have just picked up speed. No more no less. Then band on the wagen have no sheet music, and they expect us to get up and dance to them.
Not! not now, not never, and not later on either. Glad I am clear on that.
So…
If you find yourself wondering why you are not getting what these digital darlings say you need. Consider this: maybe you don’t need what they are spouting, and maybe you need to just have a conversation with a person that you find interesting.
How?
Find a person you are attracted to by way of them looking for a conversation. You’ve heard them on twitter trying to break into the conversation. Them, those kind. Tweet them back and say hello!
If they respond, begin the dance of getting to know them and them you.
And…
You might get to speak to them in real time using Skype or video calling.
Why the bother?
It changes the idea you hold about how to get what you want from “Social-Media” from following the lists of what to do that the darlings post; to actually connecting with a person who want to be connected with!!!
From that you get more…
More realizations, more information, more unusual communications.
Less lists, less noise, less frustration and less of the self doubt that comes from the plastic connections of a tasteless soundbite or digital snack.
It has become my realization that if I connect with one person every week or two and can take that connection online to a phone call, or IN REAL LIFE connection, then over a period of a year or two I will have effected what the lists project and then some.
What is is with these lists that bug me?
I see short cuts that short out the social experience of meeting the author or the writer of the lists. I don’t want the list first, I want the experience of the writer first; then if and only then if, I might find a grounding value in the recommended stuff.
I don’t see the digital darling. But I want too. I want them to give me them first, and then the list might have some significance to me. It won’t be the other way around. Lists are free and by the tweet load. The author or writer of them isn’t if they engage.
