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Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Be Careful What We Wish For?

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Or Be More Ardent than Ever?

Desire is just a sexy term for hope, it has occurred to me. I'm still thinking about what we discussed in class recently, about how social media can increase opportunities for instant gratification and can diminish desire, and how desire is an engine of social change.

In my experience, social media are agents for positive social change. The shy and marginalized can become empowered, the privileged can share and writers can be redeemed, since much of social media rely on writing and reading, and responding with more writing and reading.

Replacing Historic Hopes with New Ones

In the movie, "Milk," Harvey Milk declared, "You've gotta give 'em hope!" In "Brokeback Mountain," I empathized above all with the heterosexual wife, and also felt awful for Dan White in "Milk." In both cases, I think it's because their hope disappeared...and yet, in each case, if society had been more inclusive of gay people to begin with, no drama would have been necessary.

What if social media made life equitable for gay, lesbian, bi and transpeople, and other historically-underrepresented groups by doing as I declared above -- by giving us unprecedented visibility? Would we lose our desire/hope for greater freedom? It seems like it would take some time to catch up with thousands of years of being so often relegated to the margins. I think it would be a good problem to face -- trying to figure out what's next after freedom.

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