Dinner With Friends Shed Some Light On Social Media

I had dinner with a good friend and her husband last night. The husband is one intelligent dude and talking to him was a joy.

Anyway, I made a comment about disputes needlessly dragging on and commenting that I didn’t understand why people seemed so intent to pursuing their personal agendas when the payoff at the end was almost non-existent.

He shared this quote from Henry Kissinger with me:

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

Substitute ‘university’ with ’social media’.

The truth is, everyone has some sort of agenda even those who profess not to or those who keep insisting that others have, possibly a malicious, one.

The useful question is to ask what sort of agenda the individual has.

Usually, when we say someone has a personal agenda, we assume (possibly erroneously) the end result of that agenda is one or both of these two results:

1. Make sure I gain something at the expense of someone else.

2. Make sure I don’t lose anything which will eventually benefit someone else.

The reason why people don’t compromise and try to resolve an issue is because subconsciously they think, or maybe know, that if the matter is not resolved, eventually, they don’t really lose anything.

So they rather not lose out relatively or try to gain relatively because the possible absolute loss is nothing while the possible nothingness of the absolute gain doesn’t factor in - just win the other guy can already.

The total triviality of the issue removes any sense of urgency.

Which brings me to the final point.

The way we who are involved in social media handle the conflicts within social media betray how trivial social media is even in our own minds albeit it is arguably a subconscious inclination to treat social media as trivial within ourselves.

We can all profess to say social media is this or that, equivalent to the first or second coming of Christ, a panacea for all problems, but as long as we treat conflicts with triviality and not resolve them the way the big boys do, then social media is nothing.

Saying it does not make it.