Social media is dead, long live social media!
I had an interesting discussion with Micki Krimmel in Nokia Open Lab 2008-event. While having workshop of the next steps of social media our group started to speak about data interoperability and other things we saw important. Micki just commented that discussion that those things might be important to us “pioneers1” but real people, the ordinary Joes and Janes just use the tools for communications.
I like this mark and think it’s really important one: maybe for the younger (even younger than me) generation there’s not the history of web as we have it: I had my first website out when I was at elementary school and I see the huge difference with the way I write content here: I started with Notepad and now I just write the content without <html>’s and <a href’s. But the fact was that the content hasn’t changed so much: it’s still information of me and some links to other sites and persons.
So, what’s the most interesting thing that Micki pointed out: our chose of wording; social media, might even cause harm. As a political scientist student I know that terms are a way to use power. I’ve also see some people in the academic field defining what social media is and what they refer with that term. But what ordinary people think when we ask about Facebook or Flickr? Do they think that’s something totally different — or do they just see it as a cool and cheap way to communicate. So, as some of us want a special term to this, the question remains if that is a good word for what we do or should the term evolute to show how social media is becoming every day thing2.
Just to elaborate this more: someone asked “What is antisocial media?” while we discussed this. That is a good question — is there any media that is antisocial?
- actually, I don’t feel that pioneer in this area; I’ve been blogging for two years now and it became mainstream way before [↩]
- This sentence is based on the assumtion that social media is pushing itself to the live of younger generations and thus they see nothing special in there, they just use the best tools available. This sounds like I need more understanding in this… [↩]
Tags: communication, social media