Message in a Bottle…An Epiphany that Probably won’t Reach Its Intended Recipient

“Message in a Bottle” was not only a romantic Kevin Costner movie, but once upon a time was a hopeful form of communication. Someone would have an epiphany or reflective moment that desperately needed to find its way to the target of their affection. A message in bottle was then thrown into the ocean hoping that fate will stir the bottle to its intended destination. Before telegraphs, telephones, and the internet, message in a bottle was the hope of connecting with someone outside of your reach, but are we still using a “message in a bottle” mentality in a technologically advanced society?

The internet is just as vast as the sea because the possibility of destinations seem limitless. Today, “message in a bottle” has been upgraded to a Tumblr, Facebook Note, Blogger, WordPress Blog or some form of electronic post. There has been instances of calls for help, cries for support, profound confessions, or enlightened reflections which may or may not be heard depending on the number of followers, friends, or search engine optimization that allow search engines to find you in this vast world wide web. Does the profoundness of the message correlate with it’s ability to be heard. Is Honeybooboo’s preferences more profound than someone battling Cancer who is sharing their experiences in hopes of helping someone else because her medium to be heard is bigger? As a matter of fact, I would argue the less profound, it appears there is wider appeal. As social workers when we exercise the “message in a bottle” mentality, we lessen our ability to help someone else. It requires those in need to find us in a sea of darkens instead of being that Beacon of Light.

What can we do about it. This may not give the be all solution for everyone, but it is my attempt at navigating the seas by offering a beacon. I created a space for social workers and other helping professionals and students to network together, and it’s 100% free. One of it’s primary features is the community blog where anyone can post or repost a blog post original or from their own blog to expand their readership. How is this helpful to you? When you take your valuable time to share your dreams, triumphs, failures, and experiences that knowledge should reach as many people as possible in order to help advance someone else. All community blog posts are streamed directly to the SWHelper mobile app. Anyone who has downloaded the App from iTunes or Android can view all blog posts and social work news without having a User account. However, a user account is needed if you want to post or add comments. The major benefit of using this feature is that you can post excerpts from your blog post and provide a read more link directing users to your blog. Using this model or method will not only help increase your readership, but help you better support another professional or student without having to randomly bump into them on the world wide web. Download the Mobile App, if you don’t see any benefits in using the network….just delete it. Hope to see you at Socialworkhelper.com

This is a site and cause dear to SJS. We plan on working with SWH on this en devour  hopefully pulling the very best from their community blog to feature on SJS. If social workers are going to unite, there must be digital space to do so, SWH is that space.