Two Discussions I Had Recently About Iran On And About Social Media

Facebook Discussions About Iran

I’ve been discussing Iran and Neda on Facebook with some people who are obviously hardliners about this current Iranian crisis. A person even called Neda a “media darling saying, “The fact is she became a media darling bc so many people want mahmoud out, they will rally around any of his enemies.” He also said that no one knows anything about her – which I pointed out was not true and was very easy to find out.

I posted that, in fact, there’s been a lot of investigation into Neda's life since her death.

“I'd say she's become more of a martyr for the cause than a media darling since she's dead and was randomly shot on the street, when it turns out, she wasn't even protesting.

“She was a young, educated woman from Iran who runs atypical to most people's perception of the average, fanatical, anti-semetic, "death-to"America" shouting, nut ball Iranian that is Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah. Whether she was protesting or not is actually irrelevant and whether she is being used as a symbol for the opposition is also irrelevant.

“What matters is the people she represents: young, educated, Iranians with hopes and dreams like everyone else who also want at the minimum a voice in their government. People who never occurred to exist in the minds of I'd say 90% of Americans until these protests.”

Twitter And The Green Tinted Avatars

On Ari Herzog’s blog he wrote a post, “Why Twitter Goes Green and Why You Should Too” which inspired a very lively discussion about the tinting of people's avatars in support of the Iranian protesters. I commented in reply to @waynejohn who questioned the motivation and effectiveness of people tinting their avatar green on Twitter in support of Iranian protesters.

In his comment he wrote that he does hope “that they get what they want. In the meantime, I’m keeping my nose well out of that mess. Not my problem, nor any of the people that hopped on the next do-gooder bandwagon.”

He also wrote:

“You’re latching onto a cause that will ultimately mean absolutely nothing to you only because everyone else is doing it.

“How is this more important than our population growth? Or cutting down the Amazon. I’m not a tree hugger, but those seem like bigger issues that we should be….I don’t know , wear brown for?

“Seem silly and elementary to me.”

I replied to him and here it is in full:

"I see your point Wayne, but I disagree. The people in Iran were Twittering and making themselves heard for a reason. That reason is they want solidarity from the world for their cause. When they hear that others are behind them across the globe they may become empowered, realize they are not alone int his fight and institute real change.

"Symbolism is a powerful thing. I personally did not change my avatar. I don’t take up causes very easily but I respect and admire the people who have changed their avatars to green to show the people across the world and in Iran that they (we) are with them in this fight. It is not stupid, silly or worthless. It is powerful and important.

"And thought there are a thousand other causes to get behind some people pick one over another because it touches them in some way. For some it’s hunger. For others it’s the fight against ALS (my company). And still others, it’s standing behind people halfway across the world as they fight against oppression. It may end up that things do not change in Iran tomorrow or next week but if young people over there know that good people are wearing or tinting their avatars green in support, that may have an affect that resonates for years or generations to come.

"Imagine how powerful that one picture of that student standing up to Chinese tanks was 20 years ago. Did that symbolic moment institute wholesale change? Did it inspire people? Also, remember back to a time when you were younger, more idealistic. Didn’t symbolism mean a lot more to you than it does now? It did to me.

"I’m happy people still carry that meaning in their lives despite the problems we have here. I think that the Iranians are inspiring us to be better. And all round, that’s a good thing."

I think the symbolism is important. The green avatars may do nothing substantial in Iran but they do bring light to the cause and hopefully some people in the U.S. with little knowledge or wrong assumptions about Iranians may get an education. I know I did.

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Is There A Difference Between Social Media And Social Networking?

By Lon S. Cohen

I sometimes have trouble when I’m talking to people at work who aren’t savvy with this whole Web 2.0 thing we’ve got going on here. I use the words Social Networking for some instances and Social Media in others. I don’t explain the differences because to most laypeople, there is none and really, when I start to go into my theory, eyes glaze over and my colleagues suddenly find that the coffee truck must be outside the building somewhere and they have to hurry or Bob from accounting is going to take the last corn muffin.

But since this is the bread and butter of many of the people reading this right now, I think it’s safe to assume we can skip the gory details and get right into the meat of things. First, is there a difference between Social Media and Social Networking websites? Yes. And no. And it depends.

There is a big distinction in the terms Social Networking and Social Media. While many use these two terms interchangeably, you can separate them and the websites that represent one or another or even both effectively.

You can parse out the word Social from Media and Networking in each term. Social Media can be called a strategy and an outlet for broadcasting, while Social Networking is a tool and a utility for connecting with others. Essentially, you can lump both terms together under the umbrella of Web 2.0.

They way I do it is by taking the words and separating them into their different meanings. According to the Dictionary.com website, here are the definition listings for each:

Social: 1. pertaining to, devoted to, or characterized by friendly companionship or relations: a social club.

Networking: 1. a supportive system of sharing information and services among individuals and groups having a common interest: Working mothers in the community use networking to help themselves manage successfully.

Media: 1. a pl. of medium. (ok that doesn’t help, let’s go to the second definition-L.S.C.) 2. (usually used with a plural verb) the means of communication, as radio and television, newspapers, and magazines, that reach or influence people widely: The media are covering the speech tonight.

The difference is not just semantics but in the features and functions put into these websites by their creators which dictates the way they are to be used. There’s also a kind of, which came first, the chicken or the egg kind of argument to be made here. I suspect that Social Networking came first which evolved into Social Media.

First there was Arpanet. Years later, Web 2.0 allowed for user generated content, democratization of information on the web and blah, blah, blah… We all know the history; we’re a part of it, for Tweet’s sake.

Social Networking.

LinkedIn is a good tool for Social Networking. It’s your resume on steroids. Your interests, the companies you’ve worked for, your schools all become links to others who share your same history. Your personal profile even looks like a standard resume format. Visually everything comes across as a line item. It’s terrific for business purposes. It does one thing very, very well and that is to allow people to network in a profession online arena. You can recommend the work of others, search for jobs, and link up with connections of others in your network through introductions. You can crowdsource your connections by asking questions. And you can post or apply for jobs either through a query or through your existing connections. See how it’s all modeled on real like business networking? These are its strengths.

Since it’s formation, LinkedIn has decided it needs to be a little more like Facebook and it’s added interest groups and the ability to publish links to articles you find interesting. In that respect it pales in comparison. LinkedIn is a Social Networking website. Everything about the structure and format screams business utility. Nothing about it screams media. That’s because so much of the personal pages are taken up by business profiles ala the resume format. For a site like LinkedIn to bust out of its stogy Business Networking reputation it needs to totally reformat its look and function. A tiger can’t change its stripes and LinkedIn can’t shake the fact that it is a functional website for hooking up people wanting to do business with each other. LinkedIn is good at what it does and I’d hate to loose it.

Social Media.

YouTube is a really good Social Media website. It’s television on the web with a bazillion channels. I like the exploding Coke bottles, the funny Panda videos, monkeys falling off of logs and people crashing into garbage cans just as much as I like the step-by-step instructions on how to make an origami Millennium Falcon, viral comedy of Matt Koval and educational presentations on the history of the Internet. YouTube is a no-brainer marketing tool for any business that wants to make an impact on the web and provides one of the easiest distribution channels for video since the advent of Betamax. The elephant in the virtual living room is, of course, the Obama administration’s embracing of YouTube to distribute the POTUS fireside chats to the American people.

But if I want to network with friends and business associates, I’m not using YouTube. Sure I can subscribe to other people’s feeds and get updates whenever they post a new video but I’m never going to get the same depth of information that I’d get on LinkedIn. YouTube lets me put up my standard profile, but it’s not where I’m going to go to find my next business hire or even my next date. And I’m definitely not going to find out that my friends are all meeting up at the latest hip bar on the Upper East Side tomorrow night at 6:30. No. YouTube stands firmly in the camp of Social Media.

Social __________?

Twitter and Facebook are Web 2.0 sites with the whole package. They straddle the Social Media and Social Networking divide perfectly.

Facebook’s layout provides ample space for me to broadcast my pictures, my links, my book lists, my blog posts all while finding my first girlfriend who got married and moved to Virginia. The pictures I post act both as media and a networking tool because I can tag my friends and other people can place their own tags on my photos, labeling that hottie I wanted to talk to who just happened to get into the background of the bar I went to last week. For the most part, Facebook is a Networking site but because it devotes so much of its layout to a space where I can pack in my own stuff it is perfect for Media too. The density of information I can project is almost limitless.

Then there’s Twitter. Such a simple tool. By taking out the status update function of MySpace and Facebook and blending it with the idea of the chat room, the creators have developed one of the most versatile sites in all of Web 2.0. Twitter’s is first and foremost about projecting your words within 140 characters. What you do with those words is totally up to you. You can Tweet out a original work of fiction, you can pretend you’re a character from a TV series, you can sell stuff, inform people, link out to other websites, have conversations, piss people off or keep a low profile while taking it all in. But the essential part is connecting to others for whatever reason you want to connect with those people. In so many ways, Twitter’s most useful to distribute small bits of information but it’s the connections that make it all worthwhile. The minimalist functionality of Twitter is probably it’s most powerful feature enabling it to be many things to many people. The debates rage on whether Twitter should be for brands, for celebrities, or just for conversations with real people. The real secret is, it’s for anything you want.

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Turnstiles

I was exiting the subway this morning. The turnstiles at my station (Wall Street 4/5) are particularly tight. I was distracted in thought about some of my own problems, probably similar to your own: kids, money, projects at work, etc. when it came my turn in line at the turnstile. Maybe it was because I hadn't eaten my Wheaties or because I was so engrossed in my own thoughts but I found the resistance on the metal bars a little stronger than usual. Half way through, someone else entered and began to push on the bars behind me. (These are similar to revolving doors with bars instead of doors much larger than a typical New York City subway turnstile.) Suddenly, with that little extra help the turnstile was so much easier to push.

It made me think.

With just a little help from someone who was doing almost exactly the same thing I was doing anyway, both our burdens became easier. In fact, I thought that perhaps the person behind me was also so deep in his own mind that he never noticed how easy it was to push through the exit.

We're in a pretty big mess here economically in America. We've got some failed policies and two wars looking at us right in the face. I would not want to be the incoming administration right now, because, realistically, the cards are stacked against President Obama despite the overwhelming goodwill he carried into office with him. This morning, I had a small epiphany. It's not a novel idea that when people work together, a tough job becomes that much easier but it really became apparant to me this morning.

It was a minor feat, pushing through that turnstile, exiting the subway and heading up to the street but I realized that all of us want to go in the same direction in this country, toward recovery. Now is not the time to work against one and other; now is definitely the time to work together.

On the Social Networking sites, I see that wave cresting. It's a great feeling when all of us on these sites all are working together to make this system work. I see people on Twitter sharing links to articles, giving back to society through charity work, helping individuals who are seeking advice, engaging in conversation, challenging ideas and sharing resources. It will get better in this country. Our economy will recover, slowly, but it will start sometime soon.

I know this because I see a lot of people everyday online telling me all the good things they do in the real world and like all of us in those turnstiles, all we have to do is give a small push. It adds up. Believe me.

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The Stubborn Persistence of BBS

I was holding this post back but when I heard Loren Feldman of 1938 Media call Twitter a BBS, I had to post it right away because I thought, "Hey! I thought of that too!"

When a computer protocol was written by Ward Christensen so that one could dial up a Bulletin Board System in 1977, the early precursor of the World Wide Web was born and the sharing of information freely through networked computers residing in the homes and offices of “some other” people became possible.

The World Wide Web really started at CERN (No Al Gore joke here), European research Lab. Tim Berners-Lee set up the first web server. From the CERN website: “The idea was to connect hypertext with the Internet and personal computers, thereby having a single information network to help CERN physicists share all the computer-stored information at the laboratory.” The ability to find, browse, search and create information that can be viewed by anyone with a computer and an Internet connection came to be.

Connecting to others, having conversations and exploring beyond your own physical borders must be ingrained in our collective DNA. We need to share information with other people who may or may not be like-minded. In Twitter we have found yet another way to accomplish this.

Twitter has managed to blend many of the greatest aspects of the Internet as it has evolved and put them into one succinctly designed application that, 1) Connects us to others outside of our physical community and B) Allows us to share information with those people that we find.

So with all this history an over 30 years of innovation what is the best thing we came up with? Twitter. That’s right. We have finally developed a way for people to log in and talk to other people over long distances in 140 characters or less. What does that say about us as a culture?

The Internet started as a means of transmitting scientific and academic information, with the real stress on information. When you look at the evolution of the World Wide Web (I still love calling it that!) it’s all been just a refinement of achieving that objective.

Everything else is just exploding soda bottles and LOLcats.

Lon S. Cohen
@obilon
lonscohen.com

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My First Official Blog Post About Twitter ANd How It's Taking Over Blogging And Social Media

I read this blog post by Lexy Klain, an Account Manager at Ogilvy PR, titled “Twitter – A Professional Networking Tool.” It’s an older article but I got there in my ever popular and addicting game of Link Frogger where I jump from article to blog post to website from site links inside said articles, blog posts and websites. Usually I forget from where I originally started but when something interesting strikes me I stop hopping and read. I came to Lexy’s article from a post by Brian Giesen, a Digital Influence Specialist at Ogilvy.

While it is true that many, many people do update Twitter with useless bits of info, and in the past it was a bastion of minutiae better left to the ether, if you follow the right people and manage that list correctly while offering your own useful information and links it is a powerful Social Media and Networking tool. Believe it or not there is a learning curve to Twitter. It's best when people post tinyurl links to articles and information, join the discussion and add value rather than tell others what type of salad they are ordering or what color their poo might be.

Good ideas sometimes take time to germinate. Twitter has evolved because the users have made it useful. They have contributed the most value to Twitter, I suspect more than any other Social Networking site and that’s because of Twitter’s simplicity.

I blog less because of Twitter. In fact, I find people (myself included) apologize for blogging or emailing (instead of just replying or Direct Messaging through Twitter) saying that sometimes “140 characters is just not enough.” But it seems that most of the time 140 characters is just right.

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