Silicon Valley Confidential: What Washington Knows About Social

Source: Wikipedia

It was a great day to be in DC, though what brought me here had nothing to do with this morning?s major headline. ?Still, I found a way to connect to the moment via a meditation on how our nation?s capital has a unique purchase on this thing we call social.

What in fact brought me to town was a business pursuit in the social technology arena. ?My colleague in the pursuit is a DC-bound consultant whose personal brand sits somewhere between super-loveable?and hypersocial. ?He?s also a really smart guy. ?But whenever I get together with him in DC, I am treated to a debate on the profound differences between life in DC and life in Silicon Valley, my home. ?Says my friend: ?in DC, people really don?t get ?social.? ? I then argue that, ?wait, isn?t this the place that launched Blue State Digital?,? one of the premier social-media/digital shops that came out of the Obama 2008 campaign. ?And Washington, I sometimes point out, ?is home to DC Week, one of the truly great mega-events in the social media world, lighting up the entire city for a few days each year in a wide and motley range of locations throughout the metropolis. ?For my friend, however, the point is a matter of comparison. ?Compared to Silicon Valley, DC is less social. ?But that?s only true, of course, if you narrowly define social to only things digital.

Perhaps this is why my DC colleague and I are becoming such good friends. ?For whereas he has a romantic conception of Silicon Valley social, I am romantically attached to my understanding (limited) of DC social life. ? Maybe the grass looks greener, for both of us. ?For me, a former?New Yorker?no habituated in the suburbs, I sometimes ache for the rhythms and patterns of city life that more frequently bring people together in physical spaces. ?But because my early understanding of city life was shaped by New York ? a place, I believe, that is vastly more complex than most other cities ? the rhythms and patterns of life in DC are more palpable. ?If you are suggestible, like me, you can actually see the flows. ?Especially if you hang out with my friend. ?But I remember first thinking this seven years ago, on a visit to meet with some of the city?s top ?technology reporters. ?The highlight was a day shuttling between The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. ?Somewhere in between, one of my then-colleagues pointed out, was a famous watering hole where Senator Edward Kennedy was known to do a lot of business. ?It was a reminder of the power of place, something that I was beginning to understand was fading from my life. ?But nothing compared to our visit to the Washington Post newsroom ? the same one made famous by the Watergate film All the President?s Men. ?It took a while for Silicon Valley to tear down the cubicle walls and copy this more social style of workplace architecture, and I remember later thinking that the Post, and its stubborn fix on the 70?s, was oddly ahead of its time.

My DC friend is too young to remember reporters, publicists, and Mad Men from that era. ?But he?s cut from the same cloth. When he walks into a joint, he quickly scans to see who?s there, for it will surely moderate the flow of conversation. ?Last night, at a streetside table at a downtown eatery, he spotted one of the town?s biggest celebrities of the week: ?Kathleen Sibelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services. ?She was sitting right behind me, and my friend was so amused. ?When she got up to leave, he shouted, ?Madam Secretary, whatever the court says tomorrow, we know you?re on the people?s side!?

I would never have dared to say what he did, though I wish I had. ?But I guess I?m not that social.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/giovannirodriguez/2012/06/28/silicon-valley-confidential-what-washington-knows-about-social/?feed=rss_home

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