GREAT ADAPTATIONS

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On this buttery-warm March morning, I took a few minutes to throw some new soil on my teensy garden. The poor fuschia, which has never recovered from my absence last fall, had managed to sprout a few off-color leaves. As I gave it a drink I noticed, stuck point-into the dirt there, a shiny little acorn.

I thought of the tiny squirrel paws that stashed the acorn in this unlikely spot, and smiled. The fuschia, if it keeps trying to grow, will go back to its hanging place under the eave where a squirrel couldn’t quite reach. Instead of being food later on, it’s possible I could end up with a little oak tree in my hanging fuschia. Now there’s an interesting juxtaposition.

This is the kind of uncertainty we engage in the multiple universes of new media. Social networking and its exponential potential can take a seed, whether it’s a thought, an invite, an introduction, or some other creation, off into places we aren’t even aware of.

Doesn’t sound like much of a plan, does it? But it is. It is, because, like the squirrel with all those arbitrarily placed seeds, those multiple universes are intersecting. Our digital imprints circulate through this astonishingly interconnected multi-verse, and return to us with who-knows-who now attached. We talk to one person, they talk to several thousand. Ten or twenty or hundreds become aware of us. Because of that one person.

I don’t know if your brain is following this analogy. It makes a lot more sense if you’re out there experiencing it and it’s more fun that you might realize. In Novato Monday night, I spoke about blogging and social media to a careers transition group of 25 people. Everyone in the room was at a different level. I had a blast.

It is a real pleasure for me to share blogging’s burgeoning potential for connection, community, expression and income with a room full of people who have so far only experienced glimmers (alongside considerable confusion).

We social media users are a bit like mad squirrels, placing our bounty of words in strange places and letting them run their course. Like the squirrel, we don’t know when we’ll see that nut again, or if it will sprout into something big. But we’re in it now, and once you’ve experienced the expansiveness of connecting to great minds in such a deeply human way, there’s no reason to go back.

Happy seeding,
Suzanna

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