Daily Archives: 11/09/2009

The sum is not greater than the whole of its parts

Dear World,

Social Media.
Social.
Media.
Why do these two words con­fuse the hell out of so many peo­ple? I don’t just mean con­fuse in the whim­si­cal way your par­ents might be con­fused about how to open a file in an email. I mean con­fused — to the point where peo­ple end up doing things com­pletely bass-ackwards and screw­ing them­selves over.

Yes­ter­day, Scott Green­field and Brian Tan­nebaum posted excel­lent, some­what related and extra­or­di­nar­ily rel­e­vant state­ments regard­ing the need for lawyers to sub­scribe to and fol­low an eth­i­cal guide­line. The over­lap between them lies in a lawyer’s online pres­ence, and since I am so obvi­ously steeped in online real­ity that I instantly asso­ci­ated those verbs as online col­lo­qui­alisms (“sub­scribe” to a feed and “fol­low” on twit­ter) I will focus mainly on the online aspect of the issue.
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