Social Media Users: Shaping Our Future
By Maxim Behar
An excerpt from my book Generation F.
In my view, the active participants in social media can roughly be divided into two main categories.
The first type is there to promote themselves, to advertise how much they know, what they have done, how and why they have done it, and ultimately to demonstrate that they are at least a little better than everyone else. I strongly admire this group of people because what they share, however arrogant, immodest, or self-promoting, makes us look more closely at ourselves and gives us a guideline for how to behave and where the limit of our messages should be.
We can learn the most from these people because among the thousands — often completely random — status updates, wall posts, and comments that they post, there can often be gems that are hard to describe in a couple of sentences simply because they thought of them. Naturally, many of these most active users are also the most inventive, the most talkative, and the ones who often share the most original ideas that keep our spirits up throughout the day.
The second type is the far more passive network participants. They feel it’s a sufficient “sign” of life to like or dislike posts and comment with a couple of words. The vast majority don’t even show that they’re online, but they are there, quietly reading and enriching their knowledge.
Ultimately, as they more or less actively follow what’s going on and participate in social media, the people of both groups are the ones who have been called upon to
MOVE THE WORLD FORWARD IN THE COMING YEARS
– mostly with their vast knowledge, observations, and the opinions they have formed based on these observations. In recent years, I haven’t met anyone who has expressed or applied something revolutionary or at least very interesting in their business life and does not actively participate in social media.
The opposite is also true. Some people, who a decade ago filled the bars and cafes with their brilliant thoughts and concepts of how to change our lives for the better, suddenly got “writer’s block,” unable to overcome the new challenge and share their ideas, provided they are at all relevant, of course.
Generation F is about social media and the world, the people who run the world and how they feel, and how we feel during our transformation from Homo Sapiens to Homo Socialicus.
