This topic deserves a lot more space, but I’m going to try to give the short version of it here.  Since December of 2008, I’ve been exploring the world of social media.  I don’t know what the technical definition of social media is, and it is probably not as new as we like to think.  Suffice it to say that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs are exemplars of social media.  You get the idea.

My interest in social media/Web 2.0/new media/whatever has taken me from casually using Facebook to starting a blog, to joining Twitter, to attending “Tweetups”, to organizing my own Tweetup, to starting a social media and politics organization.  And now on June 29-30 I will be attending We.Gov, which is the Personal Democracy Forum’s annual conference on politics and technology in New York City.   I am very excited to see the speakers at this event and to meet people who are trying to improve our government and politics by using the Internet and other technologies.  (Ok, really, I am just going to see Ana Marie Cox.)

Some people fret about social media because they think it is making us more self-absorbed, more narcissistic, more isolated.  It’s understandable to worry about some of this since there are countless examples of the hyper-individualism that the Internet has spawned.  There is something to the criticism of social media as amplifying some of the more self-regarding aspects of human nature.  The whole “personal branding” movement, which is very popular in the social media world, is one example of the way that self-publishing content is leading people to start thinking they are not human beings, but businesses that should be marketed like Coke or McDonald’s.  (In the words of Jay-Z, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.”)  This all seems slightly ridiculous to me.

But I also believe that the Internet is spawning a new communitarianism, a new form of civic life that, despite our ever-increasing mobility, makes it possible to meet each other in public spaces, to form new groups and associations.   Meetup.com is just one example of how successful the Internet has been at making it possible for people to connect with others with similar interests through the Internet.  And, of course, the Obama campaign’s use of MyBO made it possible for his supporters to mobilize in certain states without any campaign staff present.

Now, after the Obama campaign’s success, it’s amusing to think about how much ridicule Time magazine received when it declared that the Person of the Year in 2006 was You.  As the media began to recognize the power of social media, critics reacted as though the only purpose of this technology was for people to constantly update their Facebook status with the most mundane details of their lives.  Twitter has recently been ridiculed the same way as only being for narcissists wanting to tell the world what they’re having for breakfast.  But people who say this about Twitter probably haven’t heard about Twestival or Tweetsgiving.

So there’s We.gov and Me.com.  Let’s not neglect to notice the We of social media.