Are We Connected Situationally or Sustainably?

My dad picked me up a Nook yesterday and I’m loving it, so far I’ve picked up a new book called Hot, Flat, and Crowded my Thomas L. Friedman and have been chewing through it the past day. This book isn’t completely new to me since Kyle G. Crider wrote a review on it for one of the communities I manage for Microsoft Hohm. Kyle brought in some great insight mainly around a quote from David Douglas, vice-president of eco-responsibility for Sun Microsystems. This quote is in reference to world population growth, currently at 6.7 billion but projected to top 9 billion people by 2050. Just facing our next billion folks, what if each person was given a single sixty-watt incandescent light bulb?

“Each bulb doesn’t weigh much—roughly 0.7 ounces with the packaging—but a billion of them together weigh around 20,000 metric tons, or about the same as 15,000 Priuses. Now let’s turn them on. If they’re all on at the same time, it’d be 60,000 megawatts. Luckily, [they] will only use their bulbs four hours per day, so we’re down to 10,000 megawatts at any moment. Yikes! Looks like we’ll still need twenty or so new 500-megawatt coal-burning power plants” – just so the next billion people can turn a light on!

This is a great quote that inspires some deep thought however when I was going through this book another quote stuck out to me that pertains more to social marketing.

“The upside of what I like to call the “flattening” of the world is that so many more people are connected today by networks and high-speed travel that they can meaningfully collaborate. The downside, though, is that so many more people can be connected situationally rather than sustainably. Whoever thought that British savers, with the click of a mouse, could deposit funds in online banks in Iceland? But in the flat world they could. And precisely because they were connected with technology, but without sustainable calques reading risk management and proper finance, those British savers were exposed to so much more financial peril than they ever realized.” (pg. 66 Hot, Flat and Crowded)

The social web is growing at an exponential rate where even Google and other massive web giants are having problems sifting through the mass amount of content created by us socialites. The social revolution has given the ability for everyone to create unique content at their own disposal and spread it through the world. At the same time we’ve set no guidelines or ethical standards other than the unspoken rules that exist spawning from the blogger generation. As we move forward and business continue to jump into the social web it will be very interesting to see if group think and social conscious stays true to sustainable interactions or will we be influenced in such a manner that situational interactions become predominate and eventually collapse the web as we know of it. Or could regulation become the undermine of our currently organic nature of the social web.

Anyways this post is just some food for thought. If you have any suggestions for other books I should pick up leave me a comment and I’ll read them and put my thoughts out on it.

Elliott Lemenager