I am social-media obsessed. In addition to writing my two blogs, I am also a social media practitioner for my day job (I head up digital media strategy at Discovery Communications). So I spend a lot of time thinking about social networking. As I often say, I believe that Facebook will take over the world. The site's impact on how we communicate, engage, learn, connect and share simply cannot be underestimated, in my opinion.
So when I was offered the chance to review Emily Liebert's new book, Facebook Fairytales: Modern-Day Miracles to Inspire the Human Spirit, I took Emily up on it. [Hi FTC! I got this book for free from SkyHorse Publishing.] Her book contains 25 true stories about ways in which Facebook has connected people even in the unlikeliest of circumstances – a grown child finding his adoptive parents; a woman being reunited with two rings of extreme sentimental value thirty years after she lost them; a couple being reunited with their cat after moving sixty miles away from where they last saw it. Liebert has explored the many ways in which Facebook can impact lives, whether personally, politically, or as a force for good.
This premise may sound corny, but Liebert has chosen stories that are actually quite compelling and not melodramatic. The underlying theme, of course, is the power of Facebook to transcend physical distance, years, and fate to connect people who would otherwise have remained strangers, or to mobilize disparate groups of people around a common cause. My personal favorites – the woman who donated a kidney to someone she'd never met before, who was a friend of a friend on Facebook; the half-sisters who met for the first time in 30 years thanks to Facebook; and the woman who raised enough money to pay for surgeries for 5 severely ill children in an orphanage in China.
Facebook Fairytales came out today. It's definitely current, as it's about a site that is having its extended moment. But mark my words, Facebook will go down as the most influential website in decades. Liebert could probably write a new version of this book every year and not run out of good fodder.
Emily Liebert has generously offered a copy of Facebook Fairytales to an EDIWTB reader. If you'd like to win a copy, leave me a comment here before Sunday, April 11. I will pick a name at random on Sunday. Good luck!