I think everyones sphere has gotten larger!

Our “sphere of influence” is our power in the world; it is our capacity as people to be compelling forces in fabricating actions, behaviors, and opinions. My “sphere of influence”, like many others, is not usually utilized to its fullest extent. We forget how much we as humans really impact the world and even further how the world is impacting us. I would make the argument that my “sphere of influence” is one of permeability. My influence is felt by others just as other’s influence is felt by me. We as individuals and as a society are incessantly influencing each other and in turn fueling the changes and progression of society at large.
In the past, creating social change, meant rigorous hours of rallying people together to help fight for a common cause. History has been a progressive effort to expand influence. Our sphere of influence has grown substantially over the years with the advent of technology and social networking interfaces, like Facebook and Myspace. Today my “sphere of influence” stretches across hundreds of friends on Facebook and countless others on Myspace. Today, we as a modern society are more connected to each other than ever before. We have an extended reach into our past, present, and future social networks, we have more power today to influence others and create social change than ever before.
Civilization as we have come to understand it, is arguably the largest “sphere of influence” that affects our everyday lives. Like our own “sphere of influence”, civilization reacts and adapts to other “spheres of influence” that work to shape the changing skeletal frame of humanity. Just as my “sphere of influence” affects civilization, civilization’s “sphere of influence” affects me. This idea ties into the ideology of social constructs, the invisible resistant that guides flow of our experiences along with our reactions to those life experiences. How can we influence without being influenced?

So how can I utilize the age of technology to extrapolate the reaches of my “sphere of influence”? As an undergraduate business major I have began to approach our culture and society as being closely tied to our economic sphere. For years, advertisers have understood the value and prosperity in being able to reach the masses. Modern networking technology, in terms of historical relativity, is a fairly new invention. I had the great pleasure to meeting the Senior Systems Engineer of Myspace, Ryan Pee-Ying on an airplane back from Spring Break in Cancun, Mexico. We discussed the lucrative residual monthly incomes produced by Myspace from advertising revenue. Ryan proclaimed the 50 million dollar-a-month company was a great employer because “the more people they can get logging onto Myspace the more advertiser attraction it will create”. It is evident that the people within social networks represents a nominal value that our socioeconomic culture assigns to them via advertising expenditure. Social Networking interfaces like Myspace and Facebook are companies employed by the fact that advertisers will pay and keep paying to influence your decisions to buy their products, sign up for their yearly memberships, shop for car accessories from their website etc. The point I am trying to make is that the resource of networking technology instantly multiplies the size of our personal “spheres of influence”. Now we can communicate, influence, and organize mass amounts of people from the touch of a keyboard. Ten college students could expand their “sphere of influence” to thousands of people within minutes. To create social change we must go where society is logged on and listening. For social change to occur we must first expand our “sphere of influence” to the masses, we must influence those that influence us if we wish restructure the framework of society.