Social Life, Social Media, and Business

 

Those who twitter and /or use other social media are aware that the hot topic currently is the relationship of commerce to Social Media.  The start of this discussion was Chris Brogan’s taking a $500.gift card from Kmart and talking about Kmart in his blog.  He was upfront about the fact he’d taken money and each reader could do with that information as they chose.

Some seemed fine with it, others were outraged, and not a small number wondered how they too could get paid. In the resulting brouhaha, it seemed as if no one looked at real life or at history to see what happens in the social world.

My father joined a small city law firm in 1946.  I grew up in a household where many of the social events included clients.  I remember being told shortly after my father made partner that we would be joining the new less prestigious country club because the firm needed representation there.  Neither “benevolent: nor “protective” are words I would apply to my father, but he joined the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks because there were business connections to be made.  His firm represented the best woman’s shop in town; my mother and my sister shopped there regularly. I could fill two or three more paragraphs with similar examples, but you get the idea.

My description implies that I believe the only connection among these people was, in Marx’s words, “the cash nexus.”  The lived experience was quite different.  Many of these people became friends.  Some, the fathers of my friends, I got to know well and some served as mentors as I grew up.  No real business was ever done at social gatherings.  Anyone who tried would have been thought crude.  Although “come by the store” or “call me at the office” were acceptable practices.  There was no deception here.  Everyone knew what the others’ businesses were.

Social life and business life have intermingled perhaps as far back as medieval guilds. We should not be surprised that it’s happening in Social Media.  Which came first, business or socializing? I would suggest that they are inseparable in the modern world.  Twitter, Blogging et al. have roots in commercial enterprises, are the result of a technology created for business, and so far as I can tell  populated mostly by people who market something. Possibly Social Media makes up for a lack of sociability in many parts of the workplace.  One does not imagine that Wal-Mart’s lawyers shop at Wal-Mart.

In such a space, honesty about our business and some reticence about what we are selling seems necessary to preserve the social aspects of the virtual space.  Chris Brogan offers a step toward that honesty.  The many tweets and comments are the struggles to define taste and tact in this virtual space.

Shameless Advertising for my Daughter

A day or so after my friend CCSeed got me on Twitter and convinced me I need to become a blogger, I received an email from my younger daughter informing me that now that the democrats had triumphed, she was no longer giving all her spare time to Minnesota’s Democratic Farmer Labor party.  She was now a blogger.  She, in fact, started two blogs at the same time.

 

The first was Mad Maggie’s Movie Reviews http://maggiealden.blogspot.com/ .  Maggie has always been a movie buff.  She minored in film in college and is literate in both film and film criticism.  I don’t always share her taste, but she’s never recommended an uninteresting film.  Those of you who care for film might check her out.

 

Her other blog is Politics, Pop Culture and Padded Bras http://politicspopcultureandpaddedbras.blogspot.com.  She writes about Brittany, her post Election Depression even though her side won, and Sarah Palin’s continuing appearances on network news shows.  She labels this phenomena “Residual Palin Puke.”  While her opinion of the governor of Alaska is no lower than my own, I was tempted to complain that her metaphor was tasteless.  Fortunately, before I wrote to her, I remembered that when I was her age, I stood before the rotunda of the University of Virginia surrounded by important literary scholars shouting, Hey, Hey LBJ/ How many kids did you burn today. Passion is more important than taste and while I’d like my kids to be better than I was, it seems wrong to expect it of them.   

 

By far her best post is “Apparently I’m a Woman who Wants Woody,”  a reflection  on her dating life inspired by reading Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. It’s an hysterically funny piece—honest, witty and touching.  I wished I could have read it as a stranger would.  However much I accept that she is a sophisticated adult, my memories of her make me aware of the sadness under the comedy.  I’m not sure a stranger would see it; her father can’t escape it.  But I am not her intended reader. Perhaps you are.

 

At any rate it’s clear I’m going to have to work if I want to be the best blogger in the family.  I’m O.K. with that.

Old before wise

The fool’s words are the cruelest statement in Shakespeare’s cruelest play.  As someone who has just reached the age the government defines as “senior citizen” and who is entering the blogosphere for the first time, I suspect that I too am ignoring the fool’s advice.  Like most Americans, I prefer possibility to fulfillment, so I’ll continue to ignore this advice.

 

What will be the themes of this blog?  Memory and the search for wisdom in various ways will inform most of the posts here.  My first classroom was in the Kgari Schele School in Molepolole , Botswana.  Currently I am the Academic Vice President of the Family Foundation School in Hancock NY.  In between I’ve taught at four universities. So teaching and learning will be one of my threads.

 

I’m a father and a grandfather, so family memory, wisdom and learning might appear in this blog.

 

I’m a scholar of the theatre and compulsive reader, so musing on literature, theater, and our lives will be another thread.  I’d like to personalize these musings in ways that are simply unacceptable in academic criticism.  If reading isn’t fun and/or enlightening why do it?

 

The playwrights I like the most Shakespeare, Shaw, Brecht, and Edward Bond (who too few Americans know) all are engaged in politics—so while this will not be a political blog in the usual since of the word the intersections of art, morals, politics and popular culture will be another of my threads.

 

Mostly though I’d like to muse on what wisdom is, how memory defines us and therefore wisdom itself—I want to bend the personal to the philosophical or at least to the critical. So if you’re interested, stay tuned.  Before I started this blog,I promised my self I’d post two or three times  a week,  so more will be here soon.