Social Media
Posted on | October 12, 2009 | Comments Off on Social Media
I am sure I will revisit this discussion many times in the posts to come but since this blog claims to explore the entanglement of social media in all (ok not really all but many) aspects of our lives I think it is a good idea to begin by defining the term itself.
Here is the opening of Wikipedia’s article describing Social Media
“Social media are media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media supports the human need for social interaction, using Internet- and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).
Social media can be said to have three components;
- Concept (art, information, or meme).
- Media (physical, electronic, or verbal).
- Social interface (intimate direct, community engagement, social viral, electronic broadcast or syndication, or other physical media such as print).”
When I use the words “Social Media” I recognize what they describe in the same respect that I understand what the word ‘consciousness’ means. I have a pretty good idea of what it is when I experience it but I just can’t point at one thing and say there it is, consciousness. Heck, I can barely spell it. It seems to me like the edges of the concept become more diffuse the harder I look at it. Our very own Heisenberg’s principal of uncertainty as applied to the English language. But then again I still live in an analog world where it is ok to have blurred edges and I am not trying to serve up an absolute adamantine definition, just a good working understanding to enable a reasonable discussion.
So, in order to try and come to that informal agreement, over the next couple of posts I will investigate more closely the Wikipedia definition of Social Media. Some of the words, like ‘meme’, are very interesting, fairly new, and deserving of our attention.
Then I will begin to ferret out some common misunderstandings surrounding the hazards and benefits of using social media in a business environment.
ken
Added a couple of plugins for testing
Posted on | October 11, 2009 | Comments Off on Added a couple of plugins for testing
Just uploaded and activated Twitter Widget Pro to the site. That allows for the very useful twitter feed to the sidebar.
Also loaded sexybookmarks which enables a selection of buttons below the post for adding this material to a social network.
Hello world!
Posted on | October 1, 2009 | Comments Off on Hello world!
I am looking forward to using this blog as a way of exploring social media’s impact on businesses, governments, the publishing industry, and on many other parts of our personal and work lives.
—
When I first started using the Internet I had already spent many years of my life reading books, newspapers, magazines, etc. and initially saw the net as the world’s greatest library. I knew how the dewey decimal system worked, I remembered the hours spent searching through periodical indexes or going blind reading microfiche. Compared to that searching this new world seemed instant, limitless but somehow still very personal (maybe because there weren’t that many of us – don’t know).
I was in awe. A new era had been born. Free information for everyone. Of course that wasn’t completely true, ask Google, but this idea remained as my mental simulation of what the internet was all about for several years. I was still using my old carefully constructed frameworks for thinking about something that was busy tearing that framework down right around me, or at the very least, rebuilding that framework into something that was quickly becoming unrecognizable.
Time went on and I got caught up in the daily business of running an ISP in Western Washington and after dealing with pedophiles, spammers, crackers, and the MPAA, really started to become disillusioned with what I saw happening on/to the net. I thought that I was watching the internet become a tool of the entertainment industry and a new playground for marketing – basically “New and Improved” TV. And I still think part of it is – I don’t think that can be stopped and really I just have to let it go. It is just human after all.
Then I reminded my self that the net is young and still very dynamic and I saw things happening that gave me great hope. People taking the net back for themselves (part of it anyway – that’s the beauty right?). People changing the way they interact with the net and the other people on the net. They are rejecting the ‘passive’ use of the internet as a media for simply absorbing what is put there by someone else. These people are taking an active, very active, role in opening up this amazing tool to very personal, very active, conversations. Participating in an exchange of the immediacy of now. Nice. A shift in the balance of power. A shift in the movement of information on the net. A dynamic back and forth exchange between many people. Right now (and not IRC, b).
There will certainly be many dead-end side trips and bumps in the road as this thing, like all things, evolves. But our opportunity to be a part of this evolution, a part of the shaping the ethics of governments through the transparent eyes of their citizens, a part of the exchange of ideas as they appear now (many crazy some great), a part of the attempt to somehow make sense of this crushing amount of information that we are confronted with daily, this opportunity, this amazing gift, is something that we need to embrace with the same joy that we embraced learning how to walk and talk.
In the same way that movable type changed the world we live in now this new social media will change the coming world.
It is really up to us to decide where that change will take us.
ken
« go back