digisqueaks

social media – where is it headed?

// June 5th, 2009 // applications, mobile, online, tech

Social media seems to be transforming not only the internet, but the world, bit by bit. Within the last few months it seems that you cannot turn on the morning news without hearing the words tweet or Facebook. In everyday conversations I find myself referring to these technologies without even meaning to. Many times I am speaking to people who have absolutely no interaction with the internet whatsoever. As I describe my internet explorations, many people are amazed at how connected everything is and how easy it is to accomplish things with various programs. Others could care less and think that it is crazy that people would want to share as much as they do. Both my explanations of these technologies and the articles I have read lately make me wonder if we will take it too far. Most likely, I think we will.

Every time I sit down to update my networks, I am surprised at how long it actually takes. Between posting photos, posting videos, publishing blog posts, updating statuses…not too mention actually generating the photos, videos, and posts. As always, the more work something takes, the harder people try to figure out a way to make it quicker. Such is the case with the our new social media commitments.

Brian Solis, principal of an award-winning Public Relations and New Media agency writes a number of excellent articles on social media. One in particular, The Social Media Manifesto: Integrating Social Media Into Marketing Communications, is especially valid for this post. Surprisingly, even though it was written two years ago, it seems to precisely describe our current relations on the internet.

Monologue has given way to dialog…Content is the new democracy and we the people, are ensuring that our voices are heard…Those who participate will succeed – everyone else will either have to catch up or miss the game altogether. Engage or die.

Of course that is in regards to marketing. Companies will most certainly go under if they don’t grasp this new technology. But even in a broader scope, I think everyone is starting to feel this pressure, little by little. The more they have pressure, the more they will want to interact or feel left out. More and more I’ll find myself say, “Have you heard from John Doe? I saw his pictures posted on Facebook, seems like he’s having a good time.” If they aren’t already on Facebook, the reply has gone from “What’s Facebook?” to “Man, I really need to join that soon.”

But what if people don’t have the time? It takes too much effort…or it’s too confusing to them. What happens then? It seems that companies are taking care of that. Of course they would. It seems the more social media interactions they can get their hands on, the more they can establish trends, customer satisfaction, buyer needs, etc. Such gives way to the incorporation of Arduino and RFID tags to do the digging for them. Ovens automatically tweet what is prepared, plants tweet whether they need water, trash cans could communicate exactly what you are throwing away, GPS can map where you are traveling, so on and so forth. Applications already in place such as DandyID, Lifestream, and many others can list almost every social network activity that you take part in while you’re doing it. Biometric Facial Recognition software is now being incorporated into programs such as iPhoto and Picasa to identify and tag people in photos. It’s only a matter of time before you can snap a photo with your cell phone and it will be able to identify people in the room and pull up their social profiles. Think I’m exaggerating? We’ll see. In the article, 7 Technologies Shaping the Future of Social Media, Mike Laurie paints a pretty good picture.

What really gets to me is what he touches on at the end of his article, Mind Reading and Natural Language Processing. Sad thing is, it is probably not far off. They are already deep into developing technology that will allow people to just think what they want to say and a computer types it for them (Brain-Computer Typing). Next comes being able to control that computer by thinking what you want it to do and concentrating. Final step is simply thinking what you want to do and the computer interprets your thoughts automatically without much effort. Why wouldn’t the next step be to make not only computers work this way but phones, ipods, etc.? Think I should tweet how crazy this is and your computer does it for you. It sounds outrageous, but it’s just around the bend. It’s already available to some people with limited motor skills.

My question is…does technology that does the work for you actually constitute social media? I think the greatest thing about social media now is that people make an effort to communicate more with each other. Not just each other, but even a broader population then they normally would. Even corporations are listening with increasing interest to what people have to say. In another article by Brian Solis, The Definition of Social Media, he describes the basics of social media:

…a shift in how people discover, read, and share news and information. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology transforming monologue into dialog. It is an evolving phenomenon that has captivated some, intrigued others, and is feared and underestimated by many.

Brian Solis offers two definitions which he thinks could replace the current Wikipedia definition of social media. His first one is closest to the current one:

Social media describes the online tools that people use to share content, profiles, opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives and media itself, thus facilitating conversations and interaction online between groups of people. These tools include blogs, message boards, podcasts, micro blogs, lifestreams, bookmarks, networks, communities, wikis, and vlogs.

So I guess even if computers take over doing our interactions for us, it still constitutes social media. But where is the fun in having our computers communicate for us, without any effort whatsoever? Will we still feel that same euphoria that comes from interacting with another human being?

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Tags: applications, blogs, cons, facebook, internet, media, online, people, software, tech, tools, twitter, update, web, work