Snot and social media

I’m having a hell of a time pulling together anything coherent this morning. I have a few loose ideas around the topic of social media and society, but I’m having a little trouble unifying them.

I was going to start with a special thank you to Andrea. She left a link in the comment box yesterday to an old Sesame Street clip on YouTube. Tristan and I spent the better part of an hour last night clicking through various clips and I was instantly transported back to 1974. Oh how I loved Sesame Street when I was a kid! Oh how I still love it today!

And YouTube made me think about how I was going to write about the debate raging in our corner of the world right now about whether students should be allowed to have cell phones and digital cameras in the classroom. Last week, two students in Gatineau (across the river from Ottawa) used a cell phone camera to record their teacher yelling at another student and posted the clip on YouTube, but it sounds like the teacher was provoked by the students and the students have since been suspended. Michael Geist wrote an interesting editorial this morning about YouTube and our candid camera society.

And I wanted to tell you that I’m so excited because I might actually be able to tie my ongoing fascination with social media to my paying job. Isn’t that the Holy Grail for most bloggers? Since I work in communications, and since I am a known blog junkie, I might have the opportunity to do some work examining how we in government can and should be using social media to communicate. Cool, eh?

Surely there is a more elegant way for me to weave this jumble into a cohesive post, together with considered reflection and insight, but I just don’t think I have it in me today. I can’t even come up with a conclusion, or a decent question to ask to solicit your comments. I blame the snot. Eight days later, and the cold from hell will not relinquish its hold on my mucus membranes. Snot and social media… surely I should have come up with a better post than this.

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