How we forgot what social media is all about
We follow, we friend, we linkin, we have buzzed and we have myspaced. We keep connecting. I believe I’m not too far off if I say we network now more than ever before in our entire history. Yet what we mostly do is connect at, dare I say, a technological level.
Additionally, we are so found of this word, network, that we have “networked” the majority of, if not all of our professions. Take for example Networked Journalism, a concept that arguably lies at the very heart of journalism today, even though, to play devil’s advocate, it’s something that journalists were required to do since the beginnings of storytelling.
However, especially as journalists, we’ve shifted from the Who to the What, from focusing on the people to focusing on the platforms, albeit platforms full of people (except for the bogus accounts), which in return makes it quite a paradoxical and problematical issue.
For the following paragraphs, I’d like to invite you to take a step back while reading this and reflect on your own social media experience. What I’m about to share is no doubt an issue you have encountered as well. It’s also an idea that has been at the very heart of several social media events in the past couple of years. And it was at such an event, that I was first confronted with this issue at a conscious level.
After 10 years of using the internet for online communications (and I exclude emails here) I had to get to the un-conferenced Tweetcamp to have my “a-ha” moment. Now I have no intention of reiterating what happened at Tweetcamp this year. It was reported and/or accounted in the numerous blog posts written afterwards, such as this one, or this one.
But ever since I moved to the UK to study journalism, little over 3 years ago, I have been attending numerous talks and conferences on the subject. Still this was a unique event, not only in that it put participants at its very core, thus being created as the day went along by its very users, but also because it took twitter offline in the real world, thus putting a face and an organic structure to both the users and the platform itself. Now imagine taking all social media offline and into the real world for a day. How would that be like? (see SMWLND for a potential answer)But let’s take a few steps back here. Social platforms were individually created with a goal. This is how the founders and CEOs of Twitter, facebook and LinkedIn speak about their platforms:
Mark Zuckerberg, said: “The thing that we’re trying to do at facebook is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently.”
Reid Hoffman, said: “[LinkedIn] is [a space] where you establish a professional profile online and then collaborate with the people you’ve connected with, whether it’s to find information or even find a job.”
As shown, it’s quite obvious what they all have in common. No matter how complex the Hows and Whats and even Wheres and Whys, they still come second after the Whos; THE PEOPLE.
YOU and me. Us. For, is social media not a mere result of our heading towards a global village? Was it not caused by our desire and need to communicate and share with someone on the other side of the planet?
I would even dare to go much further and say that it is not technology who brought us social media, it is us who generated it over so many years of desire that it makes it excruciatingly sad we forgot what it’s all about.
As a final argument for my point, here’s an example. This is what’s possible when people focus on people online. The sky is the limit as they say.
Video-sources:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/evan_williams_on_listening_to_twitter_users.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyMgR47IRPo&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/user/LinkedInMarketing#p/c/0C452924221CD70F/4/WsoEgbD3CxM
