The real value of Social Media

When the internet came about it was acclaimed as one of the greatest libraries of knowledge ever to be shared. Now 15-20 years later, it still holds that claim, obviously, as with all libraries, this knowledge needs careful application of common sense and background reading to verify learned matters, but there's still a lot to learn on the internet and always will be.

Social media, or the Real Time Web and it's predecessor/bed partner RSS feeds have extend this Tower of Babel to include one of the most valuable products we've created from a philosophical and almost anthropological perspective since time began.

The current interfaces that we now use allow all of human kind, from all walks of life (with internet access) to share their real time views on diverse matters, knowledge on subjects and other valuable cognitive thoughts with anyone that's got the time to read them.

Descartes, Plato and many other philosophers of previous centuries would have wet themselves over the idea of real time discourse with people from around the world with completely different perspectives and conceptions of reality on such an easy platform.

But discourse needs to trained, tuned and refocussed to add value, we need to seek what we are looking for. Twitter (or friendfeed, Facebook and many others . . .), as I commented on Chris Baskind's blog, have a tendency to draw people to follow crowds. This is all good and well and is indeed how paradigms come about, but if you want to find the true answers to queries, you often need to listen on the periphery. By the time a subject gets to a crowd mentality or viral following, filtering quality content from a discussion can be hard and also often deviating from the truth or original subject matter.

Twitter or any of it's bed partners in the real time web world are not about achieving the optimum number of followers for me, although every new follower should add some value if selected properly, it's about adding knowledge to my life from outside of my current window of perspective.

So next time you are deciding whether to add a new follower, check the feed for value. Sure add people from your industry, these are the most likely to add quality to your field of knowledge in the work place, but don't discount some because they aren't from your industry. Read, review and add a new quality perspective to your understanding of this very diverse and complicated world we all inhabit.

Twitter in itself is trend that perpetuates trends, sure there will be times when we use the likes of Twitter to market a new blog post or other products to a large audience, but the rest of the time use it to garner information that would otherwise wouldn't even enter your field of thought. These are interesting times, make the most of them. Cogito ergo sum.

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