21st Century Family

Top 5 Family Tech Tools of the 21st Century: #1 Social Media

There is so much information to cover here that I’m going to have to break it up more than I thought. I’m going to walk through a “Top 5″ list of technologies that I think are having the most impact on the 21st century family. The list is for fun and to promote thought on the subject and is in no way meant to be exhaustive.

I’m going to start with “Social Media” because I’ve already touched on it in the previous post for this section. The other reason I wanted to start with this topic is the fact that social media technologies have exploded squarely into the middle of the 21st century family. My personal opinion is that the effects of this will be profound but little is really known at this point. First of all, let’s get a list together of different types of social media: Facebook, YouTube, Blogs, MySpace, forums, and many others. Here is a Wikipedia (we won’t rabbit trail on what a “wiki” is:) definition of social media:

Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal and business. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).

In the 20th century people simply did not do much or any of what I’m sitting here doing right this very instant. The tools/technologies were not in place to really empower the a grassroots change in the way people view themselves…content readers/consumers to publishers. People now interact with others around the globe in an entirely different way. If a person wants to capture a short video on their cell phone and publish it for the world to see it’s just a few clicks away. Although there is way too much in this definition to dissect in one blog post, I want to zero in on one particular area: “..it allows people to connect in the online world and form relationships for personal and business.” There is no question this is true and growing at an amazing rate among various age groups. Facebook used to be the domain of young college students, now grandmothers and grandchildren connect from the corn fields of Nebraska to the beaches of Australia.

I can remember a short time ago when I had never heard anything about blogs. It’s not that I didn’t know about them, but I simply was not tied into or interested in any. My wife then started telling me about this blog called Pioneer Woman and as a result of this blog, I got to experience a killer scrambled egg sandwich with jalapenos. In my mind we were off to a really good start with social media; I was officially a fan when it put killer food on the table:)  Then I would start hearing about some lady that adopted some Chinese kid that lives in New York City or some lady whose husband got his hand stuck in a tractor or something. Uhhhh…..Houston, we have a problem. Seriously, I was shocked at how we started talking about people we didn’t know at all….crazy!  This led me to another topic I’ll tackle by itself in a later topic more fully: virtual relationships. Are virtual friends really “friends?” Let’s take it one step farther…can these virtual relationships create a virtual “family”? Are there invisible boundaries or limits associated with these types of relationships? I think we would all agree that there are some limitations, but where exactly are they and how does this define this type of relationship?

…to be continued in Part 3