This is the first in a series of articles called On Being Social. The goal is to think about how individuals and brands should approach social media in a way that is authentic, healthy and beneficial. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these topics as I’m thinking through them–send me your comments through your social channel of choice or contact me directly.

What is social media for?

The first email was sent in 1971. Usenet followed in the late 70s and the text-only BBS communities developed through the 80s, users connecting via phone lines and dial-up modems that sounded like this. AIM, Geocities, MySpace and smaller players like Xanga followed in quick succession. (If you’re curious, here’s a timeline of the first 35 years of our online interaction.) A lot has changed over those years and we are still working out how to think about this odd new world.

Living for the audience

Are we becoming a society of people who are “alone together?”

We have been wondering how social media should fit into our lives ever since we first started communicating online. We’ve feared that moving our social interactions to a digital space would create a society of people who are “alone together.” We see each other publishing more and more of the moments and details of our lives, and we wonder if we’re starting to live for the unseen “audience” instead of for ourselves or the people we love. This video (shown below) is a poignant, almost wordless critique of that tendency, while this one shows the darker side of crafting a false image of our lives for public consumption.

What are the rules?

One of the difficulties with our growing use of social media is that we don’t have a clear sense of what the rules should be. There are analogies to be found in the “old” media. The norms and laws that govern print, radio and television apply to social media in some cases, but how we should approach social media individually and as a society is still unknown territory. We are exploring this terra incognita together and making up the rules as we go. What are appropriate things to share? What is a good balance between making connections and preserving privacy? What are the norms and conventions that govern our interactions online? How do we engage in conversations and even debates? How do we grieve together in the face of something like the Charleston Shooting?

And how is it changing us?

Our use of social media is still in flux, and a lot of smart people have given a lot of thought to its effect on us, both individually and as a community. Researchers have noted effects on how we communicate, how children learn and develop, and how we receive and process news, just to name a few. I’m not sure we’ll understand its impact well for another couple generations, but it’s still worth thinking about these larger questions: What is social media for? How should we use it as individuals? And by extension, how should companies and organizations use social media? Should brands play by different rules?

In the next few articles in this series we’ll be looking at some of those questions and their implications for how we connect online. Again, I’d love to hear your thoughts on these topics as I’m thinking through them–send me your comments through your social channel of choice or contact me directly.

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