Only Tools

By Sanya Weathers

If you’ve been reading the news at all this week, you’ve seen a lot of comments and stories about how much people have come to rely on Facebook and Twitter (along with text messages and cell phone calls) to accomplish everything from the mundane to the world-changing.

You may have also seen a few articles, especially yesterday and today, on the way people can assemble and organize even in situations where texts, Twitter, and Facebook have been disabled or at least greatly restricted.

So today’s blog entry is a plea to remember that these things we build, be they games or social media or web portals, are only tools for community people. They are a means to an end.

To build a community is to build a connection between human beings. That’s it. That’s the whole point. What we do with those connections is only limited by our own imaginations. The possibilities are infinite.

The tool we used to forge the connection is only that – a tool. Here in my house, we have a very small tear in the space-time continuum shaped exactly like a screwdriver. That is the only explanation I can think of for the fact that I have purchased multiple sets of screwdrivers, and yet there are none in the tool drawer in my kitchen or the tool chest in the shed. But that hole in the fabric of the universe doesn’t keep me from needing to unscrew things, so I improvise. It’s amazing what you can do with a butter knife if you really, really have to do that thing.

I’m not as off topic as you think I am. If you lost access to Twitter today, what would you do? Well, you’d have to sit down and analyze what Twitter was doing for you to help you build connections. Were you using it for fast response customer service? To update people on site outages? Feedback? Real time conversation with real customers? What other tool could you use to meet that need?

In order to strategize, you need to know what you’re specifically trying to accomplish. Only then do you choose the tools for the job.  But never forget the main goal is building connections, and that those connections, once built, can change the world.