Social Media-itis

For the last few hours as I have been creating this blog and linking it up to everything.. it hit me... we really are living in the future now. For all my students that are 20 somethings this is no big deal. They have always lived with media. Even my grand daughter has several little computers that teach her numbers and the alphabet. To her "feeding the puppy" means going on line with me and feeding my virtual pet. The world has gotten smaller or at least maybe more compartmentalized.  I am now talking to friends I knew in highschool and advising them about how to help their kids make deals in Hollywood. Perhaps what social media has done is actually brought us BACK into community. Maybe we don't know our neighbors but now our friends can be in Hong Kong and we can talk to them daily. I think its wonderful. Yes there are concerns. About privacy and video game addiction. Loss of personal interaction. But if we lose our privacy .. isn't it because we have willingly given it up. No one is forcing anyone to have a Facebook page. If there are unattractive pictures of you floating around.. well.. its not like the rest of the world hasn't seen us as we really are. I think social media may be the very thing that will get us back to talking to each other. As opposed to television which is a totally passive pastime. On Facebook and Blogs we are communicating thoughts, ideas... inane though they may be.
When I introduced my 83 year old mother to FB at Christmas.. I explained to her how it is more efficient than emails. At a glance you can see what your kids, friends,. high school chums are up to. And if you want you can comment. Recently the most fun I have had in days happened when the girls all mysteriously posted their bra colors. Just the colors. It was fun and was a reminder to us about Breast cancer. It created such an uproar CNN covered it on the news.  Silly, maybe. But a powerful example of how pervasive this social media business has gotten. Stuff to think about.