I’m in the state of mind that can only be achieved by being absolutely alone for the last 50+ hours and reading ISO standards for the last 8. Not that I’m complaining, I’ve enjoyed my anti-social weekend. It’s just that I seem to be in strange mental territory.
Yesterday I tried to focus on my thesis as I was mowing the lawn. It worked for about half the lawn. I actually quite enjoyed thinking about imaginary little universes and winking them in and out of existence. Little universes of infinite but indiscernible items are the best mental handle I have on set theory. My research has brought me back to my old friend - set theory. In particular I’m trying to imagine how logical universes working on the “open universe assumption” would map onto universes working with a “closed universe assumption.” Thrilling, I know. It all ties into databases I promise you, but I won’t thrill you with the details.
Unprompted, my thoughts strayed to the subject of social media for the second half of my lawn mowing session. Or more to the point, what does it actually mean to be social? (Perhaps my hermit weekend prompted the subject change.) I observed that a large portion of social media is self promotion and begging for help. I was wondering if self promotion and requesting help is the same thing as being social. I expect there is a sociologist somewhere that has managed to list out and characterize all the aspects of social interaction. I wonder how that list would line up with what we call social media. Sounds like an interesting research topic (for someone else – I got plenty of my own.)
The lesser aspect of social media seems to be sharing interesting tid-bits – that seems more social to me. It’s kind of the long distance version of sitting down with a cup of coffee and chatting. I don’t think anyone calls someone up and asked them to come over so they can tell them about themselves and then get help finding something. Or maybe they do. What do I know – I was never any good at being social.
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I feel like I've only really seen social media abused for self-promotion since getting into marketing. But with any bloggers who are trying to actually make money or get famous, I suppose it's just as bad.
I recently decided to go three days without doing any self-promotion for my new blog (meaning, specifically, no links on Twitter), and traffic nose-dived to about a fourth of the previous numbers. I think that just depressed me even more about the whole situation.
In the end, I think social media's all about niche communities that actually have good content, discussion, etc. The problem, I guess, is that starting that kind of community can require a lot of self-promotion and asking for help.
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