As declining risk appetites manifest in nearly everything in 2009, from our collective views on financial risk to our tastes in culture, music, film and fashion, we will see a focus on declines, destruction and devaluation. Perhaps nowhere will this be more obvious than in the disintegration of large-scale social networks into smaller, more focused and intimate groups.
While peak social mood helped propel the movement toward increasingly open social networking platforms and large scale interactions, the rush to disassociate from the crowd will inevitably manifest as a reduction in broad network exposure and a preference for close-knit, tighter communities. Beneficiaries of this movement will be families, small groups and, to an extent, neighborhoods.
via Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis: 2008: An Extraordinarily Long Year.
Part of my efforts the last few years has been to support family, friends, and social groups around me, financially and otherwise, creating small local political groups and discussions, etc. It’s interesting that Mish is picking up on this trend and pointing it out. Tight-knit social groups will be essential to helping everyone survive tougher times. Reaching out to help those around you is going to be extremely important this year, and create tight new bonds for many of us. I think the blogging communities that have been created in recent years are a part of this, too, and will be an essential part of our support networks, while the larger social sites may become less relevant.
Sometimes we forget that there is some upside to the lean years. We learn who is important to us, and who was just there for the good times. We learn what is essential to our lives, and what was just fluff we can live without. Hard lessons, but they will be learned this year…
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Change is a natural rhythm but at times we’re not paying close enough attention and find our lives upended. Or familiar territories like twitter suddenly morph into an endless babble of voices that have no meaning. The realization that life requires more of us than a long list of acquisitions can be sobering until you realize that you aren’t here to acquire but to become the conduit through which creative energy flows into the world.
I like this idea, and maybe it’s at play in my desire to start a local writer’s group. I think we are all hungry for lost community in these days of moving too fast and with too many distractions.