Those of you who know me as a business owner in the Cleveland area have been seeing me more than ever. Those of you who know me as a guy who strums his guitar at bars and at church have seen me less and less.  But among those who know me primarily through this blog, and my Twitter activity associated with my O’Reilly Media books, well you haven’t seen hide nor hair of me most of 2010.

And there’s a very good reason.  The reason is, more than ever, I don’t really have time to participate in the social structure of online talking heads, virtual centers of influence, and the goofiness and immaturity of online activism. I realized, as I entered into business for myself (my partner was bought out in 2008), that the continuum of online thought was consuming too much of my attention and energy for me to succeed in my business.  In other words, I would rather be a leader in the offline world than a follower in the online one.

Today’s GigaOm article about social change really turned my crank, because it illustrated the reasons why I’ve disappeared from “the scene” by asking the question I can’t answer to my own satisfaction: is social networking really doing anything positive?

While the geek world has been hyper-obsessing over the perceived need for social networking systems to be agents of, and even instigators of, social change, I’ve been living my life largely offline for the better part of a year.  As I return to Twitter, the blogosphere, and social networks, I’m convinced that the notions of activism and social change, while outwardly worshipped by those in wired society, are increasingly silly and self-serving.

If we’re looking for value in Twitter by desiring it to be a component of social change, then we are missing the point of activism, and we might have to confess that Twitter has less value than any of us previously could’ve imagined.  Twitter addresses an extremely marginal, mostly young, mostly left-of-center audience, and as such, has become an echo chamber for people who generally agree with each other on the important social and political issues of the day.  And when one’s ideas are not leaving the echo chamber, it’s not fair to say the echo chamber is serving those ideas in action.  Put conversely, activism is doing more for Twitter than Twitter is doing for activism.

While this is less true on Facebook, I still take issue with the amount of poorly-researched, instantly sensational garbage I see flying around on Facebook. Columbus Day provides many illustrations of this phenomenon.  For example, if somebody wanted to paint Christopher Columbus as a savagely racist, freewheeling thief whose mission was to destroy native western civilization, all that somebody would be required to do is post a movie quote spoken by a fictional Columbus in a Hollywood film, and attribute it to the real Columbus.  The echo chamber will do the rest of the work.  Never mind that, according to informed interpretation of the historical record, Chris was in fact an institutionally racist product of his mediterranean culture, a contractor to the Spanish government duty-bound more as a mercenary than a thief, and a commander whose mission was navigational in nature.  It was the men who followed Columbus, like Cortez, who were conquerors.

Yet on Twitter and Facebook, the hashtags tell quite a different story.

My response was no defense of Columbus, who certainly had his shortcomings.  But the insane, wildfire spread of exaggerated information, ignorance of context, and situationally selected facts is–probably–the biggest single problem with social networks.  Twitter and Facebook give rise to hysteric idiocy on never-before-seen levels. And while this may help activism in some respects–getting politicians elected, for example–hysteria does monumental harm to the continuum of social communication.

But who seriously wants to sit there and correct the record all the time?  I’d rather run my business than waste my time defending concepts I know to be mispresented but that I don’t otherwise care about, while being labeled a troll in the vacuum of critical thinking that is Twitter.  This is less true of Facebook, and less true of the blogosphere, but the same blood type flows through the veins of all three.

So does this mean that I myself would write off the value of social networking?

Continue reading →