So I’m back from home. It seems fitting in a way that I left 2011 one way and 2012 begins and it’s feels different. Going back east always enables me to reconnect to a former self that I often forget exists. Years of moving places, meeting new people and so forth leave me constantly reinventing myself. While this offers me new opportunities, it leaves me wondering what I’ve left behind.

More than anything, going home always makes me remember who I’ve become and more comfortable in that. My uncle always reminds me when I see him, “when you were a kid, you always said you were gonna move far far away and you did.” Then he laughs. I think back to that loquacious little guy and I wonder what we have in common now. 

Our hopes and our dreams. He saw the globe and believed the world was smaller than it was at a time when it really wasn’t. Now it is, but I look around and wonder where I fit into this whole mess of things.

Driving back I thought about video games. I don’t really play them. But life can sometimes be like them. If you think back to the original Super Mario Brothers, there are levels and each has a boss at the end. You beat the boss and advance to the next level. At the end, there’s a big boss and you win if you beat said creature. Older games didn’t allow you to waste time deviating on your own little tasks. I watch my brother or friends play current games and it’s possible to be part of the ecosystem while specializing in a particular kind of gameplay. (Guys who only sniper in Call of Duty)

In real life, there’s the path you’re on and where you’re headed. Then there’s all of these extraneous things on the outskirts. I told my dad that when I was younger, I saw possibilities and opportunities and always wanted to take them. Not because all of them were necessarily fit for me; but simply because I didn’t want to miss out on anything. When you traffic in the mysteries of what’s possible, you want an escape hatch or a scratch-off ticket that gives you what you want faster than just hunkering down. 

When you’re younger, life seems full of mystery. When you get older, it feels very different. People still impose their will, they still communicate their expectations and want you to ascribe to the absolutes that govern how they live their lives. I’ve always been estranged from these ideas because they simply defy how I see the world and live my life. But I’ve been fighting upstream for years trying to get where I want to do in the face of all of it.

Right now, it’s about building a foundation from which the other stuff can live on. It was interesting when someone said as much without me having to express it. “You’ve got these goals and you’re working towards them. You’re building the future you want for yourself and I’ve got nothing but respect for you for that.”

I try to be ethically consistent. I don’t necessarily know my ultimate destination, but I know what I don’t want now in a way that I never used to and have become a lot better at avoiding it.

So another year of chasing down dragons and dodging fireballs.

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while and so, I figure like most things that it’s sensible to get started or I’ll never do it.

Here’s an e-book I released about two years ago called Don’t Look, Jump! That link will take you to the actual download, it renders a bit better in Acrobat than on slideshare.

Not much has changed since then, but I decided to put it out there for human consumption if you missed it the first time or happened to enjoy it.

Social media tools are stream of consciousness amplifiers. They do more than this, of course. But their role bringing to the surface things that were most certain lost a generation ago to the public record make them easy targets for the uninitiated. For some, it’s just the watercooler on a much larger scale.

The biggest misconception about the social is that it’s about personal relationships. This accounts for much of the outsider Twitter rage. I began to revolt when news stations started assigning “reporters” to use Twitter as a focus group (Brad J. Ward smartly began using that as a way to help the tool to the uninitiated, not me.)

Most of the rancor comes from cubicle farmers. They feel left out, because they feel a declining sense of relevance about what they do. Plus, a lot of them don’t have the time in their days to engage audiences and the ones that do, find the whole process a bit too daunting. I imagine it must be like playing the same sport and getting good at it for twenty years, then picking up a new one and feeling like an amateur. It’s the sort of humbling that a professional who’s near the top of their career can find extremely uncomfortable to deal with.

Everyone doesn’t need to use Twitter. Media buzz convinces people they need to do things everyone else is doing, because it must have some relevance to all of us. But it doesn’t. Social tools like Twitter and Facebook are about connections and trust. If the majority of your circle communicate over the phone, with you at work or in other direct ways, tweeting them is a lot of work.

Heck, for some people even texting is a hassle. Then there are the people whose lives are so consumed with other stuff, they wonder how any of us have time for this stuff at all. But that’s for another blog post.

For many of the Twitter denizens, these tools get used in three key ways:

1. You use it to extend your network
2. Connecting to people who you already know (and ones you meet later.)
3. People who get introduced to you from other people.

Not everyone has a job that really warrants this sort of constant interaction. Is that a bad thing? No. The same insights, information and education gets transferred via word of mouth channels just as quickly as it does on the social web. The reason social web tools are amplifiers, is they’re taking what already exists in the status quo and helps people put messages — gossip, news or whatever else people talk about — on a fast-track that might fade into an abyss of nothingness or might be picked up and carried many times around the globe.

For some, that’s frustrating. They see the web as a place with huge pools of people, among whom, some must be just like them. When they can’t readily connect with those likeminded folks, it feels like a character flaw, so they immediately resent the technology that made it possible. They see the conversations other people have, with the inanities of favorite television shows, sports, music, relationships and so forth and immediately begin to think “surely nothing productive is going on here. What’s the point of this waste of time anyway?” While their shortsightedness is understood, I wonder how many social media experts (heh) are willing to actively say “you don’t need this. Go fly a kite or play with your kids. This isn’t relevant to your everyday life.”

Our insights are impacted by those we interact with. This is common sense, but the further people get from folks who don’t understand the social web and what their frustrations, concerns and problems are; the less acute the awareness of their problems tend to be. Staying connected to the people who have “no use” for the social web can only help those of us who do.

By sharpening our lessons through the questions of the accidental Luddites, we can improve the tools we use now and make the ones on the horizon even better.