Is Engagement Optional?

Today we see Social Media duplicating many of the functions of earlier society by storing community wisdom, applying social vetting, and deploying social currencies.

It takes a Community

Here is an article is about a person who learned through social media profiling that her fiance was active in hobbies that conflicted with her moral constitution – before the wedding instead of after. Long before the Internet, the community would profile each individual based on the social record of their behavior.

Social Capitalism

Here is a video article that discusses how social media is duplicating many functions of the corporation outside the construct of the corporation. Factors of production increasingly enter the org chart as a social media application. We now question whether the corporation itself is the sole vehicle of wealth creation.

Social Currency

We see social media duplicating many of the functions of the financial system where currency, credit scores, banks, land, labor, and capital are being replaced by social currency, social vetting, social capital, creative capital, and social entrepreneurs.

Macro vs. Micro

We see divisions of scale from the long-winded one-sided content of the static web presence to the micro blogging applications that more closely resemble a conversation. Time factors are accelerated to the point where real-time is not fast enough.

Local vs. Global

We see an emerging segmentation between Local Social and Global Social. At first global leverage was the awarded the small entrepreneur with something to offer to the world. Now ‘Local Social’ enjoys substantial leverage over global corporations by reorganizing the way people prioritize and experience each other and their community.

Everyone is a node

Taking an analogy from the physics of electricity, the term “potential” means the difference in energy between two nodes. The greater the difference, the bigger the spark and the greater the impact. The local energy at each node influences the direction and size of sparks between nodes. As people accumulate ‘Social Current’, their position relative to those around them changes. Likewise, their potential also changes relative to the ‘Social Current’ of others. Everyone has some potential relative to every other node.

Integration has arrived

Much like the Knowledge Economy did not replace the Information Economy or the Agrarian economy, Social Media will not replace the corporation, the financial system, dissertation, conversations, localization or globalization. Rather, everyone becomes a corporation, everyone prints their own social currency, everyone publishes their intentions, everyone has local and global leverage. That’s what Integration is all about.

A ‘culture of one’ is moot.

It is not surprising then that our culture itself is now being defined in terms of social media with effective aggregation of social norms, storage of social wisdom, and medium of exchange for community ideals. The true test of “culture status” is when engagement is no longer optional. Without engagement, there is no culture.

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