Social Networking Evolutionary Not Revolutionary!

I was thinking about social networking and how to use it to promote business. It occurred to me that it is not a revolutionary new thing. If we look back on in recent history we can see many examples.

100 years ago there were town parades and fairs and holiday events where people got together and socialized.  Since then we have grown more and more disparate, not knowing our neighbors not getting out, doing our own thing.

We had the country store where people came together, throughout the day sitting in rockers on the front porch or around the pot belly stove, hung out and socialized.  This gave way to the backyard fence,  the street corners where kids hung out, the malls, the coffee shops (Starbucks), teens on phones in the sixties and seventies, which gave way to chat rooms, instant messaging, ubiquitous cell phones, texting and now social networking (face book,  twitter, etc).

A similar parallel exists with letters to the editor, contributions to periodicals like family circle, readers digest and blogs today.

Both of these revolutionary new mediums Social Networking and Blogs are really just the logical adaptation (evolution) of people hanging out and expressing their opinions.  The rrevolutionary part is that now they can be heard by millions instead of just a few. The pity is that bad ideas get just as much or maybe even more attention than good.

The other thing worth noting is that the old country store used to be the older folks hanging out, today all the socializing seems to be done by a younger and younger crowd.  Sure they are the ones adopting the new technology but recently I read an article that the internet is now used by 70% of the population relatively independent of age.  It is just matter of time before someone comes out with senior versions of Twitter – “Twaddle”, “Prattle”, “Jabber”, “Blabber”, ”Utter”, “Palaver”.

The more things change the more they stay the same.