Welcome to the new age of Social Media. Where we will all be producers and consumers of any media we want. You will be able to produce text, audio and video to share with all of the people of the world and participate in a global community. Your creations can be viewed, rated, tagged shared and commented on and we will be able to create a network of information. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Wasn’t e-mail supposed to do this? Or Myspace? Or the Printing Press?
Sure each of them have made powerful changes to the world but I think that people get to focused on the tool rather then on the solutions the tool can solve. Remember that each of these inventions were just that a tool, and their success was in how they were used to solve a problem. Not only that but remember that these tools get used up and passed over when they are no longer needed. Think the printing press prints much anymore? Even Myspace is probably on its way out now that it has become more of a marketing tool then a social networking site. Isn’t YouTube a Social Media site? Yet how much of YouTube is really adding to human knowledge and how much is videos of people getting hurt, music videos and comedy. Even with tags and ratings there is still so much information that some sort of filter systems need to be created. Isn’t that why peer reviewed journals are well… peer reviewed? Why do you think Wikipedia is still so strong? It’s the few thousand peer reviewers they have for the site. Volunteers who know about the subjects and how to function in Wikipedia’s community rules. Real people made these rules not by the collective intelligence of ratings and tags.
Be wary of the people touting Social Media’s ability to create a collective consciousness of human knowledge. Remember that the fist spam e-mail was sent May 3, 1978 at the very dawn of the e-mail age, even though there was rule to only use it for education and research. People will abuse any unmanaged network to promote their financial livelihood. Google is an amazing tool to find information unless you are searching about something that is sold or made money from, and then the information is buried under tons of links that are really advertisements. People even create pages with the knowledge of how Google works in order to trick you into visiting. How long before we see companies manipulating tags and reviews to drum up business? Oh wait that already has happened.
http://www.toprankblog.com/2008/03/social-media-advertising/
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