If you're reading this, you're only one degree of separation from me

I love to have a different outlet for each set of thoughts. My main blog is travels in my backyard, but this seemed like a good name for a blog about networking and social media.

A couple of thoughts about this came up in conversations today:

One was a conversation about the tone and the expectation-setting of Obama's inaugural speech. I thought as I was hearing it and many observers agreed later that there wasn't anything particularly stirring or powerful in that speech. Instead it was sober and restrained. (As some of the pundits said, he's not campaigning anymore.) Much of the speech carefully advanced the ideas of the necessity of changing course, reprioritizing, and sacrificing, all under the umbrella of taking personal responsibility for poor decisions, for repairing some of the damage done to our environment, our infrastructure, and our international reputation as champions of freedom. One of the components of that sacrifice that has become apparent to me is the need to pursue not just our own individual happiness and freedom, but to stand up for the rights of others who desire the same things (and often have far less access to them than what we take for granted).

Google, it turned out, just opened the door to this kind of connectedness. At a conference in Europe I attended in 2000 on how people and computers interact, college students and internet gurus were starting to predict the kinds of things that we are seeing today, such as applications that help you track the locations of your friends and their activities. Now, even the President of the United States depends on social media to get his administration's messages out and to organize the actions and responses to issues among large groups of people. Social media may have made all the difference in Obama's election. By working with younger staffers who understood the value of these tools and candidates rely heavily Social media seem to offer a toolset with enormous potential to allow connections based on shared history, common interests, supply/demand to happen more easily than ever.

Also, in another conversation today, I noticed once again that the explosion in social media is absolutely coincident with the implosion of print media outlets, newspapers being the first organizations to lose ground every day as fewer people depend on daily piles of paper and ink for their daily news and more people turn to online media outlets for their news. Facebook and Twitter really do seem to be killing the newspapers; the newspapers that fail to embrace social media and the realities of online news delivery today are surely hastening their own demise. (An example of a start in this direction is the lists some papers post online of their top ten most emailed and most blogged stories -- at least those reveal an acknowledgment of which of their stories are getting responses and moving readers to act, even if the act is simply forwarding a link to a friend.)

Of course, social media aren't the only triggers of the collapse of the newspaper industry, which I likened to 9/11 in the shocking destruction of institutions that had been considered robust edifices of society until they weren't any longer. There are also the tremendous energy and resource costs of printing and distributing millions of newspapers that then get disposed of (or perhaps recycled). Using trees and causing pollution for the tactile sensation of having a daily paper to read with our morning coffee seems less sustainable by the minute, in this, the post-Inconvenient Truth era.

Where am I going with all of this? Something has to give: people have to give to one another their trust, the benefit of the doubt, and assistance when it is needed; and in the newspaper industry, the whole way of doing business must shift and adjust to the changes in the way people are truly interacting. I fear that without robust newsgathering organizations, the Fourth Estate is in jeopardy and will no longer be able to retain its vital influence on the social and political powers that be. Social media may be the key to reclaiming this influence. It still remains to be seen.