Social Enterprise, Social Media Follow-up

We may know, for example, that coltan is a precious metal found in most cell phones and other electronic goods. We may even be aware that global demand for the coltan found in Eastern Congo has created a situation where machine gun armed warlords are willing to kidnap and enslave young children into labor camps. Somewhere today, a little boy or girl is being condemned to a life of cruelty, mining for a raw material necessary to manufacture consumer electronics and satiate petty wants for those of us living in the developed world. Under many circumstances, our consumption provides the impetus for a closed-loop system of economic violence where the most innocent among us are the most exposed to risk.

Social networking is culpable to the extent that it creates a platform for the devaluing of human relationships. Vice versa, it creates a greater capacity for valuing things that don't matter. The most frequent argument I heard for social networking's worth is that it connects people across geographies, but these social linkages are highly entropic by nature. That is, online relationships absent a deeper context seem to diffuse and dissipate created social capital into entropy. While social capital itself is a renewable resource, larger social structures like families and communities have a very real and finite capacity for the erosion of internal social bonding.

Like social networking? Live close to the people you love, and love the people you live close to! Bake your neighbor a pie; make a commitment to live and work in the same neighborhood; bank at a local credit union and shop at the farmers market. Create social capital that is less entropic; that creates loops of reciprocity within the social structures that matter most; that is non-violent.

I am a firm believer that the relationships we harbor provide the deeper and more profound context to our lives; it is through these linkages among people that we best understand the human condition. By cheapening these relational experiences into a series of quips and brands and updates is to cheat the communities we live in, the families we are a part of; it is to cheat ourselves.