image by eric skiff, flikr / used under creative commons 2.0 license

Social media allows good ideas to quickly surface. It also allows – encourages, even – idiocy to surface & spread. Launch a bad idea in a meeting and it will hang out there for a moment and then fall to the floor, with the other chaff, due to lack of support.

No one asks you about it, talks to the boss about it, tells their buddies about it… You hear crickets.
In social media, sometimes it’s the bad ideas that get talked about the most. They are shared & discussed… The opposite of what happens in the real world.

In offline sharing, gravity works as a filter… Good stuff rises, usually, because it takes effort to support it. No one invests effort into things, people or ideas they think are doomed to failure.
Online, gravity isn’t a good filter for ideas… It’s nearly effortless to retweet a link to something bad with a (LOL) or (what were they thinking?) addition. Since online gravity doesn’t pull at us with the same weight, we are willing to fight it for the bad, or worse, the just mediocre ideas.

The danger of living too long in a low-gravity environment has been proven by astronauts… Muscles atrophy, bones weaken. Don’t let the weak online gravity atrophy your mental muscle or your support system.