Constellations of Light and Shadow

When we gaze out toward the night sky at the random speckling of stars we begin to see patterns emerge. We simply cannot help it, that's how our brains work, we have done this throughout our entire history.

We use those patterns of light as tools for navigation, we even name them.

Though in modern times we understand intellectually those stars are, in fact, separated by distances so vast we as tiny specks of consciousness can only imagine the dark and empty void between them in the abstract at best. We still see a sword hanging from a belt.

We know that those stars have absolutely nothing to do with each other, at all, yet from our perspective we assign them a congruence. They are members of a tribe, part of a whole, like the Big Dipper or Orion.

There is a similar effect which takes place on and through social media and it has to do with the content we create, that which we share, and by whom.

Though some would call these social constellations tribes, I feel that term is both inadequate and slightly inaccurate. In fact many words we have adapted to describe the digital space are just not the right fit, others yet do not exist, and new words are needed to describe the interactions and patterns which arise.

As we share content from the same person, they will often reciprocate by sharing yours if they feel it is of quality or fits the nature of their curation. Couple this with content from other sources which they either overlap or don't and a kind of pattern of information emerges, a constellation of light.

Google can even track this constellation for individual posts with an oddly ven diagram looking analytics tool called Ripples.

From the perspective of an individual, especially one new to a given platform, seeing this person share those people, and those share them back, the points become connected, the tribal constellation emerges. Perhaps one day we shall name these as well.

This tribal perception may in fact daunt the prospective new user into becoming a lurker. Someone who may fall back on their classic understanding of tribal cultures of exclusivity, say high school popularity, versus the open inclusive reality that social media is and thus watch but not engage and not create their own content.

Because we a using old words anchored in old world concepts misperceptions can flourish. We are not exactly tribes, we are not even exactly communities.

We are like those things in some ways, but we are in truth, something else.

Digital pioneers

We are the Daniel Boones and the Lewis and Clarks. Here, now, at this very moment we are the digital pioneers, trailblazing our way into places never before seen by the likes of man.

An unexpected frontier dawned as the nature of the way in which we communicate altered so swiftly and so radically it seems as though the world has always been this way.

But it hasn't. Truth is it never has been, not like this. This makes us, quite simply, the beta testers for the rest of modern future human history.

What it is, where its going, what it could become is being hammered out by us, dreamed up, tested and explored every day. Upon those foundations new ideas will be laid, new contexts will unfold and the future will be built, brick by brick.

The world we discover becomes the world we created, the place we explore is the place we built ourselves. Call them tribes but I imagine they will be called something else in the future with a new definition. One which better encapsulates their openness to change and inclusivity by free choice.

But that is the future, and I'm just a guy writing something that isn't quite a blog on the edge of the frontier. I've heard it called a smog, or social media blog, but I refuse to call this smog, or a smog, or whatever.

It is something else I think, something which we just don't have a word for just yet.

Perhaps we will find that word hiding amongst our digital constellations of light and shadow..:-)

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