Social networking: old as the hills

A piece in the June 23 Sunday New York Times Review section caught my eye, but it turned out to be superficial, mostly a waste of time.

Tom Standage, the digital editor at The Economist, unloaded some of the points he makes in his new book, Writing on the Wall: Social Media – The First 2,000 Years.

I beg to suggest that social media as we know them now just aren't that old.

I'm no Luddite, and I'm not an early adopter of current social media, I have a Facebook page but only 11 Facebook friends and I'm not looking for more. I have a cell phone and I send a text message now and then.

I happen to like social networking, but I do it the old-fashioned way: face to face, with spoken words and facial expressions and hand gestures. You know, like they did before the Great War….

Frankly, I don't think we've had social media for the last 2,000 years. Standage used up his column inches in the Times with three cheers for the English coffee houses which sprang up in Oxford and London in the 1650s. I'm happy to agree that the gentlemen who patronized the coffee houses were doing socializing and social networking, but a coffee house is not a good example of social media.

I go so far as to suggest that each and every aspect of the use of social media is not necessarily social networking, at least not in the human biological sense. I go so far as to suggest that each and every aspect of communication is not necessarily social networking.

Let's stop blandly and blindly labeling all use of electronic media and iconic gear like iPads and iPhones as social networking. For instance, posting a Facebook picture of your cat eating ice cream is not the highest form of social networking.

I'd like to argue the point that personal human contact is essential for social networking that has traditional meaning in the context of the dynamic human communication that's been going on for a lot longer than the last 2,000 years.

Before there was Google.....