The myth of social media

Social media is a concept based on convergence at a three-way intersection of social networks, blogging and syndication. Social media lets you rely on trusted colleagues as information assets and sources, and theoretically provides context to the consumption of content and media. This is all very well, but I don’t believe that social media is necessarily a new phenomenon, nor that any triumvirate will monopolize the space. In fact, social media is part of a larger paradigm shift: the creative revolution. The current definition of social media is restrictive because:

• Social media is just one metaphor for the way that humans tend to coalesce into various thought collectives. Let’s not forget that we’ve been doing this for millennia anyway – mainly in offline mode. And the jury is still out on whether social networks can establish anything beyond weak, loosely-coupled relationships;
• Social networks have limited usefulness: if I want to find something out I won’t necessarily consult my trusted network; more often than not I’ll look outside it and find specific expertise via newsgroups, search, forums etc.;
• Social networks don’t describe all my relationships (e.g. friends, business, family, music, books), only their topologies. For a start, individual social networking services need to expose their user profiles via a standardized vocab, and schemas such as FOAF need to become much richer if all the properties of my relationships are to be described;
• Blogs and RSS are a small sub-set of the forthcoming explosion in user-generated content. The really interesting areas will be open-source multimedia (such as BBC’s creative archive), and the tools that will emerge to automate and simplify content creation. Additionally, RSS needs to expand or be replaced; it is already feeling the strain from semi-proprietary extensions such as Flickr Splicer for inclusion of digital photos.
• Social networks don’t satisfy my publishing needs: I want people beyond my trusted network to consume my content, not those who already know me. Sure, syndication can do this, and RSS also helps in understanding the provenance of content, but what has my subscriber list got to do with my social network? And why is it a big deal? All this really boils down to is better granularity of data through the use of extensible, standardized vocabularies (i.e. XML.)

The hype around social media obfuscates the two real issues, namely:

• How huge swathes of metadata about me and my life can be orchestrated (i.e. connected) to accurately portray me in all complexity, to create a meaningful daisy-chain of information – a personal information bubble – that can interact with others based on permissions and context;
• How a Copernican shift in technology is needed to address and support what users want to do in their lives – life choices come first, technology second. Following information and communication technology, the next revolution will be in innovation technology – technologies that enable an evolution in personal and group creativity.

Computers are inextricably linked with media and society, but not according to the narrow definitions of social media.

July 23, 2004