The unbearable lightness of ’saying’
Judging young net companies by their current state and making that an immutable
“It is not the social network sites that are interesting — it is the social network itself”
This is just one of the sorts of quips I have read lately on the state of affairs on the net.
On the positive side is a basic importance of the social graph. It would seem somehow we have rediscovered the meaning of our connections in our lives [the number of research, articles and blogs on it]. We’re addicted to the activity that tells us we matter. Social networking provides the means to count our value in other ways than money and show it like peacocks to all and sundry.
Yes I would agree that most, if not all of the social network sites are rather mundane today and do not offer much value nor focus to make them part of the lives of the members, beyond counting the said ‘I matter’ points.
I read some research on the percentages of social network member revisits over the last 12 months [looking for the research]. The numbers were surprising – around 60-70% of the members had NOT been back to facebook as an example. Do we read about large unique visitor numbers as there are new people joining, or? Within the top ten Yahoo and MSN tended to have better revisitation numbers. Even adding all kinds of applications onto these sites at a rapid pace does not really solve the problem, perhaps it just adds to it.
The quote, taken as it is, suggests that social networking sites are without merit or purpose and it is only what the social graph(s) make of it. Comments which seem to suggest that innovation ended about a few years ago get to me.
A survey on plaxo education group showed results from a survey asking how many social networking sites might survive beyond 2012 and the results are an interesting mixture of views on where social networking is going. Out of 521 votes 1 says 1 and 1 says 2, 92 say 2-6, 73 say 6-10, 83 say 10-100, 62 say 100-1000, 98 say 1000+, 15 say none, 96 people believe social networks will be transformed into something else. I found this today and it pretty well sums it up.
Social networking is old for humanity and it is young on the net and there is plenty of work to do before the dust settles on social networking sites.
I would be interested in finding out more from the social network owners on their actual numbers. When I find the research on revisits I’ll post a link to that.
Naturally
All smiles conversation between mother and son as the growing just keeps going
and soon:
1/ There are no more regular shoe sizes left from manufacturers => have to special order shoes
2/ The beds are too short and the door ways too low
Me: Stop growing.
Son: Why?
Me: Cause I say so.
Son: Yeah and….. and what you say goes?
Me: Of course …. that goes without saying.
If it can happen in Finland it can happen anywhere
Where balanced people go hunting and not so go on a rampage…. figuring who’s who in the zoo
One month ago a student killed eight people at a school in Jokela, which is a small town about 50km from Helsinki the capital of Finland. He then killed himself, which, according to Finnish experts was what he went out to do. He was on a modern suicide mission, it had to make the press, he had to make it matter.
A few days earlier I had been giving a table full of Americans a hard time about their gun carrying, all but one had at least one gun at home.
I live in Australia where we had our share of ‘I cannot believe something like this could happen here, in this great country where people are friendly and easygoing’ in the mid 90s in Tasmania.
In Norway, also in the 90s, two small kids effectively killed another as they left the poorly dressed girl outside in the snow.
In Australia some 25 years ago a girl was kidnapped and killed and it became impossible to let kids get to school on their own. The society changed. The difference in that regard to Finland for example was noticeable when I first arrived to Australia in the late 80s.
These are examples of ill or otherwise unbalanced persons’ warped ways to deal with life and the societies’ inability to spot the illness and instill enough ‘understanding of consequences, yes they will come’ and help. Granted in some instances those consequences are part of the truly ill person’s agenda, which is harder to deal with, where ’stranger danger’ education is about the only way to effectively handle it, bar the continuous parental supervision.
So the questions I keep asking are:
1/ Do we live according to the balanced people’s needs and agendas or the minorities’?
2/ Do we allow awful events to change life for everyone forever?
3/ What should the gun laws dictate if we cannot get the societal controls in place?
4/ What are the means for the societal controls or facilitation?
There is no such thing as absolute freedom. One person’s freedom is another person’s limitation.
The nations mentioned dealt with the shocks very differently.
In Australia there was a mass collection of guns and the ability [as against right] to carry arms was made more controlled.
In the US there is a fundamental belief that every person should have the right to carry arms to protect their families and territories. This was described to me as a remnant from the days of the wild west when such measures were necessary due to great distances from one home to the next, itinerant robbers and poor law and order.
In Finland the jury is still out as to how the society will react.
In Norway the whole society took part in a conversation on what kind of a nation the Norwegians wanted based on the ‘isolated’ event. The population voted “no we do not want to live under the tyranny of the event”.
It is clear to me that if you combine unbalanced people in a society not ready to cope with its ill, providing with easy access to guns and lots of airtime given to these events [and many other not airtime worthy things] it combines into a higher potential for the person(s) to enact for being noticed, belonging, even if it is to a group of bottom dwellers.
I asked my son what he would like for me to write about in the blog. He said write about how your youth was different from what the youth do today. As I thought about his idea I came to this as I find that the young today seem to deal with many ills, which did not exist when I was a kid. These unfortunate incidents caused by unbalanced young on other young have become news worthy. When I was a kid we got a bloody nose or we sulked about awful friends for a little while or even a long while and that was it and anything that went beyond would not have been known about, did not become an example for others.
I find that the young are parent shadowed a lot. Not giving kids the space to be kids.
It is a sad sad situation and the ostrich approach to this problem has not worked very well. Now what?
Dual lib
From women’s liberation to men’s liberation to dual liberation
The 70s was the era of bra burning in some parts of the world, women demanding equal rights in areas, which were still behind like for example women in the work force, in management and leadership roles and representation in academia [they still are].
In the 00s we ask ourselves is the approach to women’s liberation actually causing men to be lost in the agenda.
The question is: “Would women’s and men’s liberation actually be better off in today’s circumstances if the whole discussion was about dual liberation?”
If a woman/man has full time work and there is a partner and perhaps also a child, then both man and woman negotiate the terms of ‘existence’. We discuss the ‘what gives’, which is not the same in all partnerships. That’s just the stuff we can deal with inside the family unit.
How about other things that could be done to make all of this work cause by all accounts from the number of articles still written on this it has yet to be figured out.
If dual liberation is not how things are thought about at work, in places of study, in amongst the societal communities then men in particular are not going to get their balance and as a consequence neither will women [works both ways].
One of those vicious circles.
Just a thought……
