Social Is About Connecting: Person to Person

You've heard it all, right? The detrimental effect social networking has on our world, including, but not limited to:

• The steep decline in conversational skills. 
• An increase in teens who don't know how to talk to adults.
• People who no longer belong to their local communities; not volunteering, not mowing their lawns, not helping little old ladies across the street....
• People who no longer care about personal grooming or bathing; staying in their homes and never coming out; only connecting virtually.
• The end of civilization as we know it.

It's all hooey, to use a polite term. Civilization is not going to end because of social networking. Even telecommuting employees like me come out of our houses, often quite frequently — you're just not seeing us commuting on the freeway in the car next to you. I've not noticed a decline in conversational skills, except for perhaps a reduction in the meaningless "small talk" that isn't exactly scintillating to begin with. And teenagers? Please, when have the majority of them ever wanted to talk to adults? Did you? They have no trouble talking with their peers, and eventually they'll be adults and have to talk to the rest of us.

I'm sure you've seen this quotation, often attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt:

My experience with social is that it is creating an immensely exciting new form of communication enabling the discussion of ideas, all kinds of ideas, with like-minded people, regardless of location. Since you're no longer limited by proximity to communicate only with your neighbors, your office mates, or your immediate social circle, the connections you can make are almost unlimited. I think about the people in my virtual social circles, and they include:

• Classmates, colleagues and friends I've not seen for a while or had entirely lost touch with before reconnecting on a social network.
• The friends and family of my friends and family. 
• This one is cheating a bit as an example because I do work for a large multinational corporation, but I collaborate daily with colleagues from all over the US and the world with our internal social tools. Today, for instance, just a few of the interactions I had were with colleagues from New York, Colorado, Massachusetts, Florida, North Carolina, The Netherlands, Italy, Mexico, and India.
• People from all over the world who share my interests in philanthropy, social activism, books, design, technology, social networking, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, art, accessibility, writing, blogging, all things digital and my other 999 interests.

Does all of this virtual communication prevent me from being active in my community? Not in the slightest. In fact, I think it makes it easier to get involved by exposing me to new ideas.

So the next time someone tells you social networking is changing our world for the worst, you know what to say. :-)

Video Mania: Resistance is Futile

Some days I'm not sure what's going to take over our brains and world first:

• inspiring and uplifting quotes Photoshopped onto photos of beautiful scenery or cute animals and kids

or

• funny videos

Today I'm voting for videos to take first place for world and cerebral domination — have you seen the latest YouTube statistics?

• 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
• Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
• Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
• In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or almost 140 views for every person on Earth

 Regardless of your sense of humor — ironic, wacky, snarky, slapstick, dark — it's guaranteed you can find a video that will make you laugh. (A slight detour here — an interesting article that actually spells out 10 different humor types in dating profiles.)

Here are two videos that grabbed my attention today, and tickled my funny bone, as the old saying goes.

The first one is fiendishly clever. Clemenger BBDO created a vending machine to test how far humans will go to get a free snack. And the resulting video is somewhere between a evil, mad-scientist-type experiment run amok and impromptu performance art.


The second video that had me laughing out loud is this (scripted but still funny) video of two men who attempt and fail miserably to resist singing along with the annoyingly catchy Gotye song, "Somebody That You Used to Know". Come on, don't deny it — you sing it in the car too. :-)



So what type of humor and videos make you laugh out loud all by yourself, or are so perfect that you share them with all of your social networks?