Jon Husband has a good social networking post and thoughts from his panel at a Vancouver info forum (which I think is a meeting, but not the 12-step kind, well, but maybe). Anyway, read away. He gives props to Kev and Eu too (I just felt like giving them nicknames this evening) for pointing to Douglas Adams' time-honored How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet, and how beautiful is THIS:
Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.
That's why my orkut friends are my friends JUST AS EASILY, in some cases more so, than the converse.
Jon has noticed that I have been having FUN with orkut and I think he thinks that is important, which is one reason why I think he's smart.
He writes good too.
