I realize that it is human nature to jump on things with a gung-ho nature and this obsession lately to frame everything on the Internet in terms of being a part of some sort of new social media is no different. It was a message (I really hate using the word tweet) on Twitter from Chris Brogan today that got me thing more about this:
This overwhelming need to couch everything we are doing these days in terms of these so-called new social media might be fine as a way to create a new business niche as companies try desperately to use any available trick to gain market share; but really do companies - or people for that matter - need this new media they way they are being led to believe.
I’m not suggesting that the idea of better communication isn’t a win-win situation for everyone but do we really need to have to invent new terms for the newer and flashier ways to do what we have been doing on the Internet since the first posting to USENET?
The idea is that this new social media is somehow some great communication unifier that joins us altogether in some new form of communication equality. This idea was typified by a message on Twitter by QueenOfSpain
The great unifier right? I don’t think so. Communication has never been about unifying - it has been about getting your message; whether you are company or a person, to as many ears or eyes as possible and as quickly as possible. Whether you want it to be a two-way communication is entirely up to how it effects you mission statement. In the end though all communication at some point becomes fractured which is pointed out by a follow-up message by QueenOfSpain
What was suppose to be a unifying mode of communication has become a fractured one targeting a specific group within the larger whole. There is another thing though and that is the idea that this social media on the Internet is something new. Well it might be being couched in fancy new terms that can be marketed better and it might be clothed in fancier graphics and pacifying shades of a pastel rainbow but the fact this is nothing new.
While much of the world might thing that the Internet consist of web pages that we can now interact with to some degree or other the fact is that the Internet consists of another whole world that existed before web pages. that was a world of pure and free communication.
One only has to look back to the USENET, or how The Well was once the greatest repository of conversation on the Internet, or the FidoNet echos that spanned the globe long before blogs were an advertising wet dream, or even IRC that has been the home to more conversation than you will ever experience.
All these mediums where totally about conversations whether they were two way one’s or private conversation within the larger sphere. People rant and rave about the new media of Twitter or blogs or aggregators that bring them all together as if they are some great invention or something totally unique that it needs some special name. While they might be the popularization or mainstreaming of communication on the web they really are nothing more than the re-application of old ideas with a fresh coat of paint.
I do believe at some point that we will have a true new revolutionary social media but now is not that time. It is just the time when we are figuring out how to make money off of conversations that have been going on for along time.
Conversation Tags: social networks, new media, USENET, FidoNet, Twitter, Internet, commercialization, conversation
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