For social technologies class, I have been reading Here Comes Everybody - a great primer on social media that encompasses a variety of case studies including Wikipedia, Digg, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Meetup, Myspace, Youtube, Blogger, and other technologies that have developed to help user organize, connect, and expand their communities through interacting in new ways around social objects. The author, Clay Shirky, uses a few examples that look at how users of social media have used those tools to challenge the establishment (digital campaign that led to policy changes in airline industry)and to disseminate information - i.e. cell phone photos of the London subway bombing in the aftermath of the event.

Reading Shirky's book makes me realize a couple of things. People use social technology in the way that makes sense to their own needs - usually networking and expanding their sphere of connection. I don't think that there is a "wrong" way to use social technology, but I realize that I have not been interested in using these tools to their fullest social capacity. I don't tag my posts or flickr photos typically, I disable comments on blog posts due to a history of blog trolls and unfriendly reader/spectators. I ignore friend requests on facebook from people I haven't met in person and/or had some individual contact with - particularly if I notice that the people contacting me already have 2,000+ friends, or even a couple hundred. Because the power of the social technology is to work as a networking and marketing tool - very prevalent on facebook with various poetry and art groups, or book recommendations on goodreads, etc. And unless I have a personal investment in a person or group, I don't want to be inundated with information, and I wonder if others feel the same.

I did not have an RSS feed on this blog until someone asked me to add one, and then I had to ask that person to explain to me how to set that up. I figure that the people who check into this blog or take some interest in spectral presence of who I am on the web know where and how to find me in real life. Because that to me is what relationships are built on - face to face interactions, handwritten letters, the random phone call, and shared experiences in real time and space. Perhaps that makes me more of a luddite than I previously thought.

But I am very much interested in how people organize their interests around social objects - i.e. for Youtubers it's videos, for flickr members it's fotos, for Twitter it's status updates. For the Buffalo and WOMPO lists it's poetry, or maybe it's publishing. For people who connect through Meetup, it's the idea of not bowling alone. And there is something within the technology that encourages creativity, sharing and a sense of community in modern times that can't be ignored.