It's one thing to talk endlessly in a strokey-beard way about the power of social media, it's another to have it brought home to you personally during a major life event. My daughter was born last Wednesday (coincidentally at the same time as the birth of our new company SapientNitro).
As soon as I had regained the feeling in my legs and drunk a restorative cup of tea, I found myself unthinkingly tweeting her arrival (something modest mind you) and uploading early photos to MyTwitFace. Not, I hasten to add, because I am 14 and have nothing better to do. But because I knew that would be the fastest, easiest way to share the wonderful news with our family and friends.
Similarly, my good friend and colleague Tom Evans is unwell at the moment (get well soon) and I found out he was on his way to hospital not by text, or from his wife, or by phone, but because he sent a 1 line tweet telling everyone (and no-one).
Somehow, and without any fanfare, it's simply become normal to share instant moments of the most personal kind with people you know. And people you don't. In fact, things don't feel quite as real until you've shared them.
Hold the tweet, you say, doesn't Tom do this for a living? Isn't this something he should have been doing as a matter of course 4 years ago? Well, the truth is I was. But in an experimental, try anything kind of way to find out how things work for myself. And most of it was from my laptop, which is mainly on my desk, which in its own right rules out spontaneous life experiences like skydiving or doing Tequila slammers with the Archbishop of Canterbury (not something that happens often).
The big difference is that it's now totally mobile. I can share images, thoughts and ideas in real time from my iPhone without any delay or loss of quality. I can be in the birthing centre, on a cable car (again, this doesn't happen too often) or at the end of the garden but nothing is going to stop me telling you what's happening right now. And that's the fundamental difference for me: it's unleashed a genuine spontaneity to my microblogging and networking that wasn't possible before. In essence, it's as much about my life outside work as my work life.
But that's the tricky thing. Just like mobile phones created a tyranny of contact, and Crackberrys made email an unbroken stream of consciousness, social media creates an expectation of immediate, personal and important information. I only hope I am interesting and funny enough...
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