A Change of Heart about Social Networking

I took the plunge this weekend and joined Facebook. My 17 year old son and even my wife had joined long before I could bring myself to do it – it just didn’t seem like something a stodgy old soldier would do. In fact, these days, the military bans the use of Facebook and similar social networking environments, although probably as much for security concerns as bandwidth conservation. Being long retired from the military, such a ban influenced me nonetheless. It wasn’t my cup of tea.

Another reason it wasn’t for me is that I had long disdained the so-called “I Love Me” walls that my fellow officers persisted in putting up every time they fell in on a new command or office. It always smacked of “showing off” their medals, class pictures and other successes while trying to impress their subordinates and peers (it never worked on their seniors since the bosses had even bigger walls to fill up). I even succumbed to it by the time I made Lieutenant Colonel. As an admission, I have used LinkedIn for many years, but always rationalized that as being necessary to build a good professional business network.

I might have had it all wrong, however, as Facebook has come to demonstrate to me. In this blog, I will endeavor to write about the way the Connected Age is changing relationships, both locally and globally. It’s really about exposing something of yourself in order for others to get to know you, perhaps where they relate something of themselves to something they see in you. It isn’t always easy, as my own experiences and those of other fellow officers showed me – some people are just more private than others. And some cultures are likewise more private and closed. We are very blessed to live in such a free and open country, as so many Americans understand.

In order to get along with others, however, it may be that you just need to know something about them: social networks enable that dynamic to occur more quickly and visually. Sharing your life and interests in pictures, telling others “What are you doing right now?” and looking for new “friends” with similar interests or backgrounds, almost forces us to strive for a new level of transparency and social consciousness that living in an isolated world could never achieve. It’s a lot more than an “I Love Me” wall, it’s a decision to be a part of a community and help change the way people think. As we move along this connected path to new forms of local and global social community, it may just be that “I Love Me” walls turn into “I Love You” walls, an important concept even in Facebook.

Until the next time,

- Just an Old Soldier’s musings