Have we forgotten why we’re here?

I had an interesting encounter with a car guard this weekend. This experience made me realise how much I take for granted and how the little things we do in life can have the most profound consequences for people and sometimes for our environment as well.

On Saturday, as I was going to the bank, I was throwing about ideas on social media in my mind and after the incident with the car guard, it hit me. Who knows how long our recent obsession of social media and Web 2.0 will last before the-next-best-thing comes about. Our dedication, fundamentally, isn’t really tied to Web 2.0 or social media. We are dedicated to the principles behind it — creativity, communication, great ideas. We are dedicated to the facilitating of the most efficient and effective forms of communication between people as well as methods of transfer and storage of knowledge in all its forms. As I had mentioned before about marketing, Web 2.0 and social media are merely the tools we are using at the moment.

I feel the question we should be most asking ourselves at the moment is: “Are we using our newfound tools to create real change or are we just amusing ourselves with our toys?”

The answer is simple to find if you read your last few blog posts and check your last few tweets on Twitter. If we are just amusing ourselves at the moment, how do we change the direction of our thinking to create this real change in our lives, our environment and in our relationships? It all goes back to what I was talking about in the first paragraph, change the small things.

I feel that in our being overwhelmed with Web 2.0, we’ve lost track of the main ideas and principles which made us embrace it in the first place. This new technology was meant to further spread education, enable more people to talk to each other across vast distances, facilitate the spread of ideas and culture and creativity.

I remember reading Chris Brogan’s question on the future of social media and thinking that right now, we’re stuck in the stage where we’re trying to understand what we are dealing with in this newly designed arena of technology. I’m just hoping we can shift gear and start moving to fulfilling the destiny of what Web 2.0 was spawned for in the first place.