Doug Henwood
On Feb 10, 2011, at 3:03 PM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
> Stop. It's not about a hymn of praise. It's about understanding how it
works... in some detail. Saying that the civil rights movement succeedeed
without social media so that means social media is nothing...will not do.
I really hope you don't think that I think that. But I've actually been spending a lot of time reading, interviewing, and thinking about what social media mean. And it's not all good.
Doug
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In other words, if I may venture to put words in Doug's mouth, the focus has to be on utilizing, for more or less immediate purposes, the tools that come to hand.
But it occurs to me, "social media" are a collection, and no one has ever or ever will "understand" a collection. And that is what I object to in Joanna's formulation: she sets a silly goal. One needs description of the various tools to hand, but I don't understand what it even means to talk about "understanding social media."
As Socrates/Plato observed two millennia+ ago, the first step in thinking is to carve the roast at the joints, not break the bones. I'm claiming that Joanna is breaking the bones..
Carrol