Social networks must smarten up

Every day we put more and more of ourselves online. It's the undeniable state of affairs. You can try and fight it, but it's clearly a losing battle. Everything is moving to the internet: our bank accounts, jobs, shopping, entertainment, and most transformatively of all, our social interactions. But until now those interactions have generally been shallow soundbites. On Twitter and Facebook can we throw cows @ one another and raise imaginary lettuce, but do we ever really move beyond that superficiality? In everyday life we expect so much more out of our experiences: why aren't those expectations been recreated online?

Lately I have become enamored by a unique type of online engagement, one which takes meaningful exchange as the starting point for social interactions. THINQon is a content-based community for, well, thinking. It is a world of intelligent dialogs akin to late night conversations with friends, or those we have after stimulating classes and lectures. It's a type of social networking that wards off online numbness and truly activates my mind. Most importantly though it's a real community, one where the contributors (they are not 'users') challenge each other to grow, change, and think. This depth of interaction is the basis for relationships, not status updates and 140-character fragments.

Whether it's politics, movies, or books, I like that I’m talking with people the world over who I wouldn't otherwise ever meet. And not only people from different countries, but also people of different ages and religions and from every different walk of life imaginable. It's these differences which provide the unique contexts by which we can form real relationships that move beyond the limits of a friend's Facebook wall. I think this is the most pivotal opportunity an intelligent web has the potential to offer us: meaningful relationships with people we would never get the chance to meet. I've enjoyed reading the tweets of young Egyptians from the streets of Cairo, but what's more interesting to me is engaging them in a meaningful conversation, one where they can truly develop the discourse of their new Egypt.

The world of our generation is going to be an online world, and I feel it is up to us to decide what that world will look like. Is it going to be a meaningful space where we challenge and grow together? Or are we going to waste away endlessly on Facebook and Twitter? Do we want to understand; do we want to ask why? I feel we are at a crossroads, no less than the Egyptians, and we need to act to create the world which we want to inhabit. Our lives are what hang in the balance. We can’t assume an intelligent life exists unless we make the effort to create it.