Likelihood of Success

Only connect

Mar 12, 2009 Heart and spirit, Nuvo-Techno, Social networking

Via Reuters:

One in every 11 minutes spent online globally is on networking sites. Between December 2007 and December 2008, the time spent on the sites climbed 63 percent to 45 billion minutes. . . .

The biggest growth in Facebook membership comes from the 35-49 year old set. Facebook has added twice as many 50-64 year old visitors as it has visitors under 18.

It’s really not surprising.

Online social networking is moving from a toy in the hands of adolescents to something grownups can understand and use.  Well okay, not all grownups; I needed half an hour to talk my mother via Skype through the process of uploading a picture onto Facebook.  But clearly its application has matured [UPDATE:] and, as Bill Scoble says in this article, there are separate FB worlds for grownups that have nothing to do with what “the kids” do there.

In other words, people like people.

They particularly like people whom they like.

That includes people they used to like, and with whom they may not have had contact for decades.  Even more powerfully, it often includes people whom they hardly knew, and even some they didn’t like at all, but who now connect as adults with far more in common than once divided them, across the intertubes.

I guess you could really say that, well, the whole thing is very nice.  Contrary to all our talk about alienation, atomization and polarization, maybe the very things that threatened to chill and isolate us could, with increasingly compelling levels of truly warm, personal interaction, bring us — back — together again. A great thing happens when we can lap  at the milk of human kindness.  Yes, it’s an absolute good to be reminded of how others care about us, remember after a generation good things about us we thought were ignored or didn’t even see in ourselves, or even build bridges over long-dessicated channels of separation. When spirits connect and share each other’s warmth, a lot of other harsh, stupid and ultimately meaningless things can recede to their appropriately subsidiary places in our lives.

What if, because of the Internet, the famous attention that, for so many of us of a certain age, “must be” but is not paid… can be?  Even just a little?

Do pay attention.

UPDATE:  Other are.  Here’s a thoughtful article from a mature adult professor at William & Mary about how faculty members are using FB to stay in touch with the development of recent graduates; and Mashable, of course, is way ahead of everyone else.