In a conversation with a friend last evening, it came to my attention that it is really important to have a common element in conversation so people can relate: the shared experience.
What we had really talked about was an earlier time in life when there were only three TV channels. So, most of America was watching the same program each evening then sharing the experience at lunch, at the water cooler or on the playground the next day. We recalled when we were kids that on Monday at school we all asked each other if we had seen “Disneyland” the previous Sunday evening.
This set in motion a conversation and the shared experience. What had we had for dinner? What else did you do on Sunday or over the weekend? What did you think of the story?
While we maybe quite can’t correlate the current media to those days of old, the experience is similar, only with a compressed time frame: did you see so-and-so’s tweet? What about that new LinkedIn profile? What’s with the buzz on Facebook about X? You get the idea. We need to translate the culture and use these vehicles to make the shared experience that much more real for us as we go through our day-to-day lives.
It will help us connect in much the same way as those old Three-channel days.
Relentless
