As I head off for a weekend in London away from all this stuff I’d like to leave you with a question, if that’s okay.
What is Social Media?
You may have picked up hints that I don’t really like the term. It’s vague, no-one really knows what it means and because of that anyone can claim to be a social media consultant potentially putting it in the same dirty corner as Search Engine Optimization (although that industry has cleaned up a lot in the last couple of years). But we appear to be stuck with it, at least until it gets too big and divides into sub-industries, so we’d better figure out a definition, preferably one that doesn’t involve too much jargon.
Here’s a braindump of topics:
- Blogging
- Photo sharing
- YouTube, etc
- Facebook, etc
- Online tools for communication
- Blurring of publishing and conversation
- Metadata rich objects (text, video, photos) on the Internet
- Sharing of information, advice, experiences
- Augmenting the “real world”
- Blurring of offline and online
- Low barrier to entry
- non-hierarchical
- Distributed communities
- Geographic or temporal limitations removed
- Ambient relationships / awareness
- Cats with captions on them
That’ll do for now. The Wikipedia entry for Social Media also has some ideas though there by no means definitive.
So what would you say if someone asked you the question? You have until Sunday evening to collectively produce an answer!
OK a starter for ten…
Focus on the word “social”.
When folks started talking about “new” media they were creating a set of oppositions, and implying the existence of “old” media. Certain practices and media texts came together and were understood to be “new”. As soon as something is called “new media” it therefore becomes part of this dicourse of newness.
So, can we create a similar argument around social media? Does social media indicate that we understand other media forms to be asocial?
Is social media therefore less about technology and more about cultural practices of making and consuming?
Humans are highly optimized for social behavior. When technology allows us to use our ability to keep track of other humans in order to do stuff and share information, that’s social media.
By way of example: We’ve been dealing with info overload ever since the printing press. Winston Churchill lamented that there are good tales, and well told, that we will never be able to read. We rely on people we like to help us find books; now we’re able to rely on people we like to find web pages or unlikely contacts for a few minutes help with a project. We didn’t build better search to deal with books; we just had librarians, readers’ advisory, and friends with common interests, and social media is “that which supercharges that stuff we were doing before.”
paparazi for the masses?
There seems a lot of jargon inferred by the term social media.
However, to me it is really just word-of-mouth communication. It is the modern grapevine. It includes web 2.0 technologies like facebook and twitter – but its also about email, texting and even good old fashioned face to face conversation.
People love to talk about things. Social Media is just an enabler to do this across a wider area not governed by phsical space. It helps people to generate their own content, or find other users content, either words, pictures, or video, and share this content with their friends/workmates/associates.
In terms of spreading the word, like the grapevine has always been able to do so effectively, social media uses the power of the crowd to spread the word!
Hope this was useful.
James Rock
I dislike a lot of the buzzwords but I actually quite like the term ‘social media’. To me it suggests people sharing info amongst themselves, distinguishable when compared to broadcast media (where information is pitched at you by a structure claiming authority).