Image by Polyvore.com

With the new plat­forms of open­ness, all you need is social love

These days we’re liv­ing a historian’s wet dream. We are con­sis­tently record­ing his­tory through all our social tools. Our actions, feel­ings, thoughts, our every­thing, con­stantly being recorded. From where we are eat­ing to what we are annoyed about to what it is that makes us tick. Not only are we record­ing the “big” things but we are record­ing every­thing. It’s his­tory with­out hiccups.

Ben Parr wrote an excel­lent post on Mash­able on the topic. Parr: ” For the first time in human his­tory, the day-to-day inter­ac­tions between peo­ple are being per­ma­nently recorded and for­mat­ted in eas­ily orga­ni­z­able seg­ments of information.”

Mil­lions of us are pub­licly record­ing our daily activ­i­ties on our Twit­ter feeds for the world to know for the rest of time. All details are recorded from who we were with and what we were doing to when and where. His­to­ri­ans in the future will not need to guess any details. They’ll have all the infor­ma­tion right in front of them.They’ll actu­ally prob­a­bly know more than they care to know. With pic­tures on Flickr and videos on YouTube and text on Twit­ter and links on Face­book and, to top it all off, per­sonal blogs, his­to­ri­ans will have much the info they need about our inter­ac­tions with one another.

I can already see future muse­ums dis­play­ing this era as an era of com­mu­ni­ca­tions galore when mil­lions of us were about trans­parency and open­ness — our dig­i­tal ver­sion of the ’60. Free social love for all. We can­not share enough of our daily doings with one another and we can­not hear enough. We long for the feed­back from our sur­round­ings and the immor­tal­ity of our souls by record­ing every­thing we do. We feed on the inter­ac­tions around us.

It’s no coin­ci­dence that real­ity TV is one of today’s most pop­u­lar TV gen­res. Peo­ple like to watch other people’s lives. For the same rea­son, social tools are also so pop­u­lar — peo­ple like to see what oth­ers are doing and inter­act with them while they’re doing it. Peo­ple are look­ing for ways to con­nect more with one another no mat­ter what geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion they’re at. In what other age was it so easy to inter­act with some­one two con­ti­nents away from you?

We are learn­ing more about each other’s cul­tures and actions, relat­ing more to one another. Per­haps there’s a chance for us to get along with each other?

I can­not write such a post, of course, with­out men­tion­ing the story of how the U.S. State Depart­ment reached out to Twit­ter and asked them to delay a net­work upgrade that was sched­uled in order to allow Ira­ni­ans using the ser­vice to protest the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion that took place on June 12. Twit­ter moved the upgrade to a later time. Lev Gross­man in Time.com writes: “Twit­ter didn’t start the protests in Iran, nor did it make them pos­si­ble. But there’s no ques­tion that it has embold­ened the pro­test­ers, rein­forced their con­vic­tion that they are not alone and engaged pop­u­la­tions out­side Iran in an emo­tional, imme­di­ate way that was never pos­si­ble before.”

There’s no ques­tion that social tools are chang­ing the face of his­tory. The real ques­tion is: Are we fully ready for the change and its future con­se­quences? Are we ready for an era of total trans­parency?Ayelet Noff is founder and CEO of Blonde 2.0, a con­sul­tancy spe­cial­iz­ing in help­ing brands use social media tools such as social net­works, the blo­gos­phere and social soft­ware to cre­ate brand aware­ness, recruit employ­ees or achieve any other goal. See her busi­ness pro­file, con­tact Ayelet, fol­low her on Twit­ter or leave a com­ment below.

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