Dolf's Blog
Integral thoughts about development, humanity, spirituality
Networking Sites - Collecting Friends or Integral Development?
20 September 2007
Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, Hyves, even Zaadz - set up as the platforms for the current informational phase of social development, some of them are now no more than places where people strive to collect as many "friends" as possible. The more people you are linked to, the more popular/important/great you are, seems to be the rule. The more "friends" you have on these sites, the more exposure your profile with more or less interesting information or blog with more or less relevant views will get.So, great, you have your network. However, how many of your "friends" do you actually know? How many of them did you ever get any form of contact with beyond the first invitation to link up profiles? What do you actually do with this network of yours?
What many of these sites end up doing is merely satisfying people's needs for appreciation or for belonging. Appreciation meaning an essentially egocentric need to be seen, recognized, loved. To be caressed. Which is OK, by the way, but there are more effective ways of satisfying that need than being part of a virtual community. Belonging is a need arising in higher stages of development, where the feeling arises that you want to be part of a group of similarly-minded people. That is a basic human need as well, but is that need really satisfied by building a virtual network of people you really don't know?
What I am wondering about is what we, the community on sites like Zaadz, want to do with our networks. Building a network is fine - it's one step towards greater social development. But once you have it, what do you do with it? How do you take networking websites beyond the (at most) pluralistic level and make Integral use of it?
A few suggestions:
* Listen and Talk! This seems obvious, but in order to build a higher level of togetherness, we first need to communicate. Interaction on these sites is often limited to comments to blog postings that rarely exceed the level of "I agree" or "kudos". Real interaction is very much missing but also very much needed to form a real network.
* Share! Building a community means foremost that we communicate with each other and share our views with each other. Blogging is often just a one-way street where someone post something to the world and starts counting views of it. Sharing means in the first place posting relevant content (e.g. MsCapriKell's postings of her Integral Spiritual Practice: MsCapriKell's Blog) and as such inspiring other people. And the next step is to listen to other people's views of the subject and interacting with them. Then blogging works for the benefit of all involved.
* Organize! Once you get interaction going through sharing, organize your network. Do something useful with it. For instance, a while ago, a fund-raising effort was started to enable one of the Zaadz members in Uganda (Saidi - Saidi's Blog) to start up his own Internet Cafe. It is these kinds of efforts that are inspiring and bring the world a bit further towards being a great place.
Let's all get together to further develop the world. There must be more possibilities in these websites than merely collecting contacts and one-way blog postings. Zaadz is the foremost platform to start doing this!
