The common refrain is that the advent of social media is pulling people apart. You hear it all the time, people spend too much time looking at their phones, or there is more time spent talking to people through text than there is talking to people face to face. Instead of lamenting the advent of technology like old men shaking their fists at the skies, it’s a better choice to look at what social media can do.
Take the Food is Free Project; it’s a project that, without social media, would be limited to the town where it was founded. More accurately, it would be limited to the street on which it started. The concept of giving away food is an old concept, a way for neighbors to find excuses to go visit and be social. It couldn’t be considered a movement, though, because it was strictly local, and spreading the message on a large scale was something that wouldn’t happen.
That’s not to say trends didn’t exist in years past, or that ideas couldn’t catch on far beyond their place of origin. The difference is that this is a quick and easy way for small scale, low budget movements to start to gain traction. An idea from Texas is now an idea in Yorkton, and then could spread somewhere else entirely.
What has been invented is an online equivalent to the old coffee shops, billboards and church meetings that used to define community living and event coverage. The difference is that it’s a method that transcends the relatively limited reach of those methods. Everything listed above was limited to within the community, so while someone could start a food giveaway and tell their coffee shop friends in the old days, now they can tell the entire community immediately, updating people on progress even if they’re not going to see them at the local haunts.
That is not to say social media is a replacement for regular, face-to-face interaction, because it is not. Ask Stacey Tress herself and she’ll say she wants to see more people meeting in person and building community that way. If anything, social media is a way to introduce people, but then they have to start meeting outside of the online sphere. But it’s still a way of connecting people who might otherwise be unfamiliar with each other.
It’s no use to lament the way the modern world has changed, because we have to live in it. Instead, if we want to build connections, community and bring people together, we need to use the modern world to our advantage. Food is Free is a good example of how people can use that technology to foster more organic interaction. You need to visit a Food is Free booth, but you find out about it online, it’s both kinds of interaction.
