Those of us in the tech blogosphere forever seem to have a high opinion of ourselves and our thoughts. We continually pontificate on how what we are doing is going to change the world. We are forever coming up with cutesy phrases and buzz words of how we have discovered a new way to spread the word of technology. It might be fancy terms like Data Portability that really is nothing more than ways for the established high valued players to fill in the chinks that are developing in the walls of their silos. Or then there is the whole idea of social media that actually has nothing to do with make our real social interaction anything more than electronic patting on the back,

As Adam Ostrow said recently on Mashable when he was talking about Data Portability:

Not quite. At first, it seemed like Data Portability was a lot of hot air, with everyone scrambling to put out a press release and associate themselves with “the open Web,” but offering little in the way of specific plans. But then last week, MySpace announced Data Availability. Finally, there was a real implementation of Data Portability on the horizon, that out of the gates promised us integration with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter. But then, Facebook announced Facebook Connect. And then, Google announced Friend Connect. Facebook then decided it didn’t like Friend Connect and blocked it. So much for that idea. There’s a word to describe this, and that word begins with cluster and rhymes with duck.

Then there is this whole internal buzz within the blogosphere of how social media is going to be the big game changer when in fact all it is doing is creating a new buzz word for things that have been around for as long as computers have been able to talk to each other. It is just a revamped proxy for non-personal; or rather faux personal communication. Sure things like blogs and social networks might have old media running scared but even as Michael Arrington pointed out on TechCrunch this Data Portability is just a whole new set of walled gardens.

Then through all this we have the ongoing discussion about how noisy courtesy of things like FriendFeed, Twitter and Facebook the whole tech blogosphere has become. Funnily enough this appears to be only afflicting the tech blogosphere as it seems from what I have read elsewhere things like the political or lifestyle blogs have had a better acceptance factor outside of the blogosphere as a whole. For us we seem to be spending more time bickering about noise, made up concepts like data portability and social media than we are about Matters like some web service hitting the illusionary line of mainstream seem to be more important than real discussions about society and it being changed by technology.

We bicker about who broke the news over a tidal wave and earthquake instead of making true social changes to our society. Social media is suppose to be the game changer for old media forcing it to join the rest of the world in this new user generated world that does nothing more than to make a small group continually richer. Instead we seem to be finding ourselves locked away in silos where the talk is nothing about using technology to change our society. Rather we seem to be spending more and more time propagating the illusion that what we are talking about is important.

The fact is that all these discussion aren’t making any changes to our society. As Sara Perez points out in a post on ReadWriteWeb where we are more concerned with all the tools at our disposal; which in turn only increase a limited number of tool providers market evaluation, instead of using the incredible power of numbers to force real change.

Much is made of the generation who has grown up with the Internet and all these services and how they could be the ones to use all these tools to make changes to our society. However both Sarah in ReadWriteWeb and Corvida from SheGeeks show in two different post just how much of this idea is not much more than bullshit and marketing spin for the corporations behind the whole Web 2.0 movement.

While it is nice to see people get all warm and fuzzy about disasters a world away and plugging for donations it means nothing as long as we have people in our own country living in their cars or cardboard boxes. Social media doesn’t mean squat when we see our education system sliding down to the point where it can be ranked with third world countries. Freedom of information on a world wide basis doesn’t mean a rat’s ass as long as the very gateways to the information are being blocked by corporations more concerned with executives earning 255% more than the average worker.

Until social media means something more than Katrina victims abandoned by their government and any changes affect the very society that is being left on the have not side of the technological divide all this talk is nothing more than a giant circle jerk trying to see who’s ego can fly the furthest.

A noisy internet means squat when your child goes to bed with a gnawing hole in their gut. Data Portability isn’t worth llama spit when the working poor have to decide between food on the table or insurance on their vehicle so they can keep trying to see the other side of the poverty line.

Don’t tell me how all this technology is going to change our world when the poorer get poorer and the rich get richer off of user generated content. So as you go to all your fancy tech conferences full of your own egos ask yourself - just how much of a change is this freenomics of yet another useless social network or twitpitch doing to really make this a better world. Or is it really just a matter of joining the ranks of the super rich.

Conversation Tags: social media, social networks, homelessness