While the WSJ is documenting the latest dunderhead effort by the marketing industry to exploit the Social Media Revolution for its own short term gains, RobPatrob reminds us that the opportunity that the Social Media Revolution presents us with is a whole lot more interesting and the problems it might help us solve a whole lot more important.
"It seems that our institutions have turned inward and now serve only themselves.There are great ideas out there that have the power to turn all of this around. We know that a local local direct food system will renew our food system. We know that if we put our resources behind parents of young kids that most of our learning, behavior and health problems would diminish, we know that if we invested in renewables and networks what we use to subsidize coal and oil that we could approach energy independence. We know that a military that saw its role in cultural terms could act with authority in a troubled world for a fraction of the cost.
The issue is not ideas. Every field has more than 20 years of great thinking ready to make a difference. The issue is power.
Like the Catholic Church in the 15th century, the institutions have the power to keep the ideas contained, the innovators cowed, co opted or crushed. The cost of our political system means that our representatives are owned by the interests that only serve themselves...
...The greatest paradox of all is that a new technology has the power to take us home away from machine relationships to being more human and more aligned to nature. So what Social Media is all about is remembering how to be human again".
I like the idea of a new Reformation - cutting out the middle man from our (naturally) Social Selves. Now there's something to Twitter about...