On social media, you can connect with a large number of people while remaining snuggly in your personal, little cocoon. You don’t have to even engage with your network much, let alone connect with them emotionally. And yet, from that emotionally-detached cocoon, you can engage with many, many people at once and leave them all feeling very much connected with you.
This is a new experience who’s operators don’t seem to be clearly introverts or extroverts. Is social media spelling the end of introversion?
Credit to David Fisher of Ajax; it was a conversation with him that spurred the idea for this post!
Jason Seiden is CEO of Ajax Workforce Marketing. Ajax amplifies brands by aligning employees' online messaging.
I'm Jason. I run a brand agency with a specialization in workforce marketing.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Jason-
Thanks for this. I think I understand what you are saying, but my take has been that social media has given introverts more channels of information – ingoing and outgoing.
My best career growth came when I was in the midst of talented, creative people, and then could take my personal time to read and study on the topics that helped me improve in my work. Now, even if my work team isn’t that type, I have access to a broad array of people who welcome me when I stop by, and are always putting ideas out there to chew on. That’s why HREvolution was so appealing to me. I don’t like the big conference environment, and although I interact with many of the participants on an occasional basis, I felt a need to still make that personal IRL connection, at least for a day.
So maybe, in the context of what you are saying, introvert/extrovert paradigms don’t matter as we get more sophisticated with the use of the tools.
@Tim—Pretty cool, isn’t it? How an “introvert” can now put himself in the middle of a large group of like-minded experts, connect with them at will, and yet remain totally unfazed by the breadth and depth of his connectivity!
Hope to see you at HREvolution this fall in Chicago…
Jason,
As an introverted school leader I couldn’t agree with you more. I recently wrote about this myself, but I would offer the following: Imagine the power that these online tools can provide for all introverted students? Yet, as a society we continue to look at these online spaces as always dangerous and social, but not necessarily places of learning. I hope we are able to move past this and make these spaces learning spaces for all students.
@Tony—Our nation spends twice as much on entertainment as on education… but we do spend on education. Give it time.
@Jason,
While I agree with you regarding funding, I’m not convinced its about funding. It’s about changing cultures… about changing dogmas… about changing beliefs… about changing long standing traditions that no longer meet the demands of tomorrow’s students.
Okay, this will probably take a bit of money to happen.
Thanks,
Tony