wherever you roam and admit that the waters around you have grown. And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone, if your time to you is worth savin’. Then you bet­ter start swim­min’ or you’ll sink like a stone. For the times they are a-changin’.

When Bob Dylan wrote the lyr­ics to the above song in 1963 it is said that he wrote it as “a delib­er­ate attempt to cre­ate an anthem of change for the moment”. Sub­sequently his crit­ics have dis­missed it as “out­dated by the very changes that it glee­fully pre­dicted”, how­ever I would tend to agree with Chris­topher Ricks who allegedly said that the song “tran­scends the polit­ical pre­oc­cu­pa­tions of the time in which it was writ­ten” (Source: Wiki­pe­dia).

Con­sider the cur­rent trend in social net­work­ing. Like it or not, this is here to stay. And quite frankly I would like to offi­cially adopt Dylan’s song as an anthem for the Wired Gen­er­a­tion as, for me, it sums up nicely the new gen­er­a­tion gap of those who get it and those who don’t. Par­tic­u­larly the fol­low­ing verse:

“Come moth­ers and fath­ers
Through­out the land
And don’t cri­ti­cize
What you can’t under­stand
Your sons and your daugh­ters
Are bey­ond your com­mand
Your old road is
Rap­idly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.”

Recent social media faux pas (dare I men­tion Nestlé?) show that more often than not big busi­nesses just don’t get it, des­pite the wealth of advice and inform­a­tion about it that is freely avail­able online. Either that or they simply defer to the gen­er­a­tion who should get it, but don’t have the exper­i­ence to use it wisely. I would also sug­gest that there are some out there well aware of this who are will­ing to exploit it. Not many, but they are out there. I’ve seen them.

I like to think that I get it. Not all the time, but that’s expec­ted. Some­times it throws strange things to the sur­face. Strange things which are usu­ally in video form. Or on Flickr. Some­times sparks of genius light up Tweet­Deck; some­times the feeds are drip­ping with malice. But it is always there, defin­ing how we inter­act with each other, the 72% of 25% of the world’s online pop­u­la­tion using social networks.

For the times are, indeed, a-changin’.

(Lyr­ics © 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1992 by Spe­cial Rider Music. No copy­right infringe­ment inten­ded. http://www.bobdylan.com/#/songs/the-times-they-are-a-changin)