Social Media and "The Great Turning"
Twitter processes more than one billion tweets a month. It has over 50 million tweets per day and 600 tweets a second. Twitter does not report its user numbers but Twitter has grown by 1500% in the past year. Twitter co-founder, Evan Williams, told the BBC's Carrie Grace on The Interview that, “Our goal at Twitter is to be a force for good. We have a fundamental belief, having worked on this type of thing for 10 years, that the open exchange of information has a positive impact on the world."
“Media” has traditionally meant “authority.”
Through magazines, newspapers, television and film, ordinary people, in isolation from one another, have passively received information created by a few people sharing one-dimensional perspectives, agendas, and biases. “Media authority,” in the old paradigm, has defined what the valuable news and information is. This traditional one-dimensional perspective of what is called “newsworthy” has mostly come from the white men who dominate North American society.
A one-dimensional perspective carries a bias and agenda that is often blind to itself and this is true of all of us. The central focus of authority-driven news has been violence and death, negativity, and sex because that is what “sells newspapers”. This focus has been used to control and condition ordinary people.
I stopped paying attention to this form of news years ago. Whenever I check in every few years, it is the same old, same old, one-dimensional, sexualized horror, violence, and negativity. Traditional authority media is not only factual and unemotional.
It is judgmental and arrogant in its assumption that its dominant one-dimensional perspective is the only truth.
Social media is changing fundamentally the way we humans discover, create, and share information. No longer is “authority” media able to control and shape our thoughts and our world view, or our values, dreams, and actions. Social media is media that is created in a shared, reciprocal experience and it is disseminated through social interaction.
In social media, we focus on each other. It is a reciprocal exchange of personal experience and story. This revolutionary information exchange is the nexus point of our unfolding future as these stories are told, minute by minute, on planet Earth.
To be continued...