Right now I’m sitting on my couch writing this using my netbook with the tv going and Mythbusters on in the background. I have my receiver switched to AUX where I have my media server (which is hooked up to my TV and surround sound) playing my mp3’s on random. I’m sitting here and I can’t help but be amazed at the technology that surrounds us on a daily basis and how we just completely take it for granted.

When I was a kid I couldn’t fathom a computer as small as my netbook, let alone how powerful my phone is. I would never have thought of hooking a computer to my TV and using it as the monitor. Watching movies by playing a file instead of using some physical media would have been just plain preposterous and the stuff of science fiction. But I’ll tell you something I always knew would stay the same.

When I was a kid I loved having the tv on with the volume off and music playing from the record player/stereo/cd/cassette player instead. Which, in a technologically superior way is what I’m doing right now, I just went about it differently.

That’s how I used to play my Atari, original NES, and later computer games as well. I have long used this means of visual audio combination as a tool to help me create. It gives me something to look at that isn’t what ever I’ve been obsessing over for the last several hours yet doesn’t completely distract me, and I always look forward to those neat little moments where what’s on TV matches up perfectly with the song I’m listening to at the time.

But what does this have to do with you and me and the rest of the world you ask? What does this have to do with Social Media? To state it simply, everything…and nothing. On the superficial level it means nothing. It’s just me talking about the conditions in which I like to create. But lets look at the first part of that answer, the everything part.

I shared a story about how I have been doing the exact same thing that I have done since i was a kid and as new technology came about I just adapted and found newer, easier, and more interactive ways of doing it. This to me is a metaphor for social networking. When we were kids and all the way on up through young adults we had a mandatory way of networking in the form of schools. Meeting people with similar interests at recess, learning from them, exchanging ideas, stories, and media (through cassettes, dvds, comic books, etc).

College was a bit more advanced form of the same thing but we still did it every semester. We sought out people of like interests and shared media (content) with them (who then became our friends) and they exposed us to new stuff and new people and on and on the cycle went.

When you boil it all down what I’m trying to say is that social networking (even social media) isn’t anything new at all, it’s just the next step in how humans connect. For the skeptics out there who are still stubbornly refusing to “jump on the band wagon” quit dragging your heels.

This isn’t something new, it’s just a new way of doing the same thing we’ve been doing since we climbed out of the primordial ooze and started making guttural noises at each other. We’re finding new ways of connecting.

image by dpstyles™

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