Forget the Naysayers

There are a lot of naysayers out there when it comes to emergent communication technologies. They talk about how useless services like Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn are, but the proof of concept for these tools is obvious once you start honestly using them.

Ramsey Mohsen pointed out a very poignant truth in an article on his blog:

“Facebook sucks if your friends suck”

There’s an old saying, “If you look for the Devil, you’ll find him”, look for people posting garbage and you’ll get garbage, but that belies the whole point of communication technology. Connect to professionals and your network will be professional, connect to creatives and you’ll have a creative network, it’s a simple concept that so many seem to be overlooking.

Feedback Loops

Feedback is important in understanding the way social media works. If you feed bad data into the system (or ask something like “What are the most useless things posted on Twitter?”) you’re going to get a response based on the nature of the input.

Those critics don’t realize that due to the input/output nature of the net they are going to get exactly what they are looking for. They cheat themselves of a valuable experience by asking questions with answers that have no worth.

Why waste time feeding bad input into the system when you could be providing positive value?

Imagine what would happen if they started asking the right questions. With the amount of horrible content they’re able to dig up, how much good content is out there waiting to be found?

Or more importantly, waiting to be created?