So I’ve found myself thinking a fair bit about my pending nuptials lately, what with the fiancee celebrating her birthday and meeting with the officiant today. And it’s occured to me how this here Interweb has come to play quite a role in weddings these days.
We have a wedding website, of course, powered by WordPress and featuring an RSS-enabled blog for people to keep up to date. As the date gets closer, we’ll put up an RSVP form so people can confirm their attendance electronically. The site will have links to the reservation site for the hotel and things of that nature, along with the necessary maps and visitor info.
My Quark whiz wife-to-be is designing our invitations, which will go out as pdfs by e-mail to the younger and more web-savvy invited guests.
She’s also joined a social networking community for couples that are getting married in the same month, thus giving us access to resources we can draw on in real-time as we all navigate the many checkpoints between “Yes” and “I do” together.
“So what?” you ask. “Why prattle on about your wedding on this here blog on communication?”
Because, I think this all underscores something we “bloggers” all too often overlook about our medium of choice. If social media tools are really going to find purchase in the mainstream, they have to be utilized in ways that the general populace can grasp.
Frankly, the sharing of information and news that we all trumpet as the information revolution isn’t as radical as we’d like to hope. A depressingly-high percentage of the population really isn’t interested in broadening their horizons and accessing more information.
The New York Times offering RSS feeds won’t make social media mainstream – the same people are accessing the information as before. It’ll be the 2.0 take-up for wedding planning, child-rearing and other life events that will.
+1 point for the cleverness of your post title.
-1 point for the cheesiness of it.