I’m not trying to take on a cause but I pull for social networking sites to bring out our collective humanity. Really these sites just reflect who we are. If we’re jerks then we can be even worse because we don’t have accountability. If we hate, we can hate anonymously and be very cruel. But we can also reach out and be moved by people we otherwise wouldn’t have known. And impact far more people’s lives.

This card from @Postsecret is an example of how social networking sites can bring up painful memories. I wrote recently about how I experienced a mother losing her baby, almost in real time on Twitter. That’s another example of how social networking sites connect us in various ways on different levels.

It was my birthday this week and thanks to Facebook a lot of people knew about it and wished me happy birthday. I could think it was too impersonal but I didn’t — I just enjoyed it. It strikes me though that with all the automation – I could die and people would still wish me happy birthday, my ebooks & products could still sell, blog posts I’d written could still go live, tweets could go out, etc.

It’s sort of eerie in a way but also sort of immortal in a way too…notice this message below isn’t in past tense. I’m not sure how I feel about it. The internet brought us a global community & these tools only make it more intimate.

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