It’s always great to see who all will gather together, early on a Wednesday morning, and make their way to the Social Media Expedition Breakfast.

Wednesday morning, April 1st, found the breakfast at the Holiday Inn at the University of Memphis. After some opening remarks from Social Media Expedition’s Dave Barger, The mic was handed over to Kris Markman, Ph.D., from the University of Memphis, for her presentation, "A Species Driven to Connect."

Dr. Markman’s presentation focused on how society functions with technology. She kicked off her discussion with the idea that social technologies are nothing new. Though they use new tools to cover greater distances faster, essentially, it all sums up to basic communication – Facebook, even as it nears ubiquity, is just a fancy version of cave painting.

Humans, she continued, simply need other humans for survival.

So we communicate as we always have, and we find brand new ways to do it. One pattern Dr. Markman has noticed is that society is beginning to stratify based on those who can more readily adapt to new modes of communication.

This doesn’t say anything about skills or age, necessarily – Markman noted some Pew Internet and American Life numbers that show that economic and social conditions also affect how quickly people adopt new technologies.

Interestingly, these new divisions don’t necessarily fall along the same (age-based) lines we might expect.

For example, podcasting is more common among the Generation X set, even though they aren’t as involved with things like Facebook or Massively Multiplayer Games, that you might find to be common in younger demographics.

Essentially, what Markman seems to be saying is that what makes online communications so interesting is that it’s so difficult to pin down the demographics of it in a general sense, because the information skews from example to example.

After the presentation, we broke into smaller group discussions, including topics such as blogging, Facebook for business, and Twitter. There was even some demand for information about Yahoo! Pipes – if you’ve got an interest in or knowledge of Yahoo! Pipes, please, by all means, join us for the next Social Media Expedition Breakfast, the first Wednesday of May.

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The post "A Species, Connecting" by lunaweb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Tags | breakfast, Dave Barger, LunaWeb, Memphis, networking, Social Expedition, social networking