From the cave to computer

APPOMATTOX — OK, so I went to this social media conference that I wrote about a few weeks back. When I walked in, I immediately felt like the Geico caveman — and not just because I haven’t had a haircut in awhile.

Most of the 30 or so people sitting at a row of long tables in the Appomattox Community Center were bent over laptops. I had a notebook and pen.

“I’m in the same boat as you,” said Al Baughman, who looked to be about my age (middle) and was also brandishing a Bic. “Everybody else here is 20-something.”

Actually, that wasn’t quite true, but it was definitely a young crowd. A couple of the under-25 participants owned their own businesses. One of the two main presenters was considerably younger than my daughter.

In his series of books on the future, collectively titled “Megatrends,” John Naisbitt makes the point that for every trend, there is an equally powerful opposing trend.

When many of the top banks began coagulating into larger and larger corporate entities, other entrepreneurs began opening small, localized banks like the Bank of the James as an antidote.

As our jobs require us to do less and less physical work, we spend more and more time in gyms and health clubs.

And so on. Last weekend’s conference in Appomattox pointed out yet another of these tradeoffs. The image of people involved in computers is that of solitary “geeks” pecking their lives away on self-imposed islands. Enter social media.

“We are, by nature, social creatures,” said Linda Mills, the aforementioned presenter. “You’ve heard of the six degrees of separation? Social media breaks it down even further.”

At another conference I once attended, a gathering of “futurists” in Washington, one of the speakers made the point that it was impossible to predict the future.

“It’s impossible,” he said, “because there is always some wild card event that changes everything, and which we can’t imagine in the present.”

Like the invention of the Internet. Who knew? Who knew that one day we would be able to type in one address in Bismarck, N.D., and another in Rustburg, feed them into Mapquest and the directions from Point A to Point B would appear in less than a second? Or that it would be possible to sell virtually anything to virtually anyone on e-Bay? Or that Bill Gates — the computer geek’s computer geek — would be worth $72 billion at one point?

Again, John Naisbitt: “In a world that is constantly changing, there is no one subject or set of subjects that will serve you for the foreseeable future, let alone for the rest of your life. The most important skill to acquire now is learning how to learn.”

For there is no more security. What if someone were to announce next week that they have discovered a way to make automobiles run on water? Or robots that actually think?

As a journalist, I have already noticed that the speed of news is approaching the speed of sound. We are bombarded with updates on our TVs, our PCs and even on our cell phones. Last week, a man came and put a satellite dish on our roof, and now we are getting even more stations than we did before.

So how can social media help? As I understand it, it is like a group of people joining hands to keep from being blown away in a hurricane — in this case, a hurricane of data. Using Facebook or Linked In or Twitter, you can find people with exactly your interests, or people interested in doing business with you. It gives us a sense of personal power in a world that increasingly conspires to make us powerless.

“The battle cry now,” said Jennifer Mills, “is, ‘We geeks can do it ourselves.’”

And just as the Internet revolution brought forth new stars like Gates and Steve Wozniak, so it is with Twitter, which grew an astounding 422 percent in 2008 and is exploding even faster this year. Says Chris Brogan, one of social media’s instant gurus, “One of the ironies of being in the Internet marketing profession is that I fly all over the world telling people how you don’t have to fly all over the world to build relationships.”

“I would have liked to have attracted more people,” said Linda Goin, who helped organize the Appomattox conference, “but we do have a nice mix.”

Indeed. There were Web designers and Realtors and ad salesmen and a couple who started a bed and breakfast in Charlotte County. There was Copeland Casati, a Richmond-based green building advocate with pink hair. There was Joe Gerstandt, who flew in from Omaha to talk about the changing role of leadership.

And even a caveman or two.