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Conversational Social Networks

Byrichard
Ben Thomspon wrote, “How Facebook Squashed Twitter“.  The article looks at social networks from a marketing point of view. I like conversational social networks. Social networks by their very name are for conversations. They are about connections and they are about friendship, collaboration and more. 
In its Golden age twitter was a social network to establish new friendships with people we had yet to meet. It was a great tool, especially in places like London where the community of users was big enough to be interesting. Facebook, on the other hand, was a network of school friends, university friends and eventually colleagues. Facebook was more of an interactive yearbook.
Between 2006-2009, both networks were good because they were about friendly conversations, event organisation and personal sharing. At this time user engagement and stickiness were very high.
Both Twitter and Facebook are losing their appeal. Twitter lost it’s sense of community in 2009 when people went from following friends to following celebrities and when conversations went from being  individual to threaded by hashtags. As the closeness between users faded so did the stickiness of the network.
Return on investment has always been looked at from the point of public relations or marketing because they are the people paying. Their cost is financial and so twitter wanted to keep them happy. They ignored the other cost. Time. Private individuals need to justify giving their time and attention to social networks too. In the early days of twitter, when it was a conversation tool, we could justify spending the entire day on twitter because it allowed us to establish new business contacts, new friendships and more. When attention shifted from conversations and friendships to utilitarianism the network declined in value.
Facebook too is declining but for other reasons. It is a network of friends who are getting married, having children and working hard. They don’t use facebook in the same way as before. Social networks need to re-invent themselves as time progresses. Twitter needs to work on re-creating tight-knit communities and Facebook needs to find ways of making itself relevant to parents and working professionals now that our university lives are behind us, for the most part.
Social Media and Social networks have been around since the birth of civilisation. The difference is that social networks are now online as much as they are offline. Social media have gone from being paintings in caves to being Devo art, memes and other products. Facebook and twitter were great social networks because they helped to assemble communities on the World Wide Web. We are now shifting to regionalisation and interest based networks. I am thinking of Strava, Glocals, Sports Tracker and more.
I stopped using Twitter because I stopped finding conversationalists. Facebook too, is at risk. If they do not make an effort to remain relevant both of them will become dormant networks.
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The idiocy of the Hashtag

Byrichard

Every day I am reminded of the Idiocy of the Hashtag. Twitter is a conversational medium where the more we converse the more addictive the social network becomes. Every single @ reply was a reaction to what we said or shared. Connections between users were strong and so the network effect took twitter from being a strange experiment in 2006 to being a social network from 2007-2009. In those days we engaged with people directly.

Social media marketers, people with families and other priorities came to twitter and decided that they would indoctrinate people in to seeing twitter as a broadcast rather than conversation tool. Broadcasting did away with the conversation. It replaced the conversation with buzz words like ROI (return on investment) and other buzz terms.

From a conversational medium where everyone talked directly to everyone else these “experts” hijacked the conversation and encouraged the use of the hashtag. The hashtag took person to person communication, encapsulated it in a hashtag and neutralised the individual to individual communication channels. Individual to individual communications are what makes all social networks addictive. If I believe that someone wants to listen to me, to talk, to exchange ideas then I am likely to make time for them, to read what they have to say, to create a personal connection. That personal connection had me travel to Paris, London, Geneva, Lausanne, Lille and other destinations.

Imagine that twitter was still a conversational medium. Imagine that we established personal connections with the event organisers. Imagine that instead of a hashtag we were talking with the twitter account of event organisers. Imagine for a moment that twitter was seen as networking, that socialising on this network was not seen as a waste of time. Imagine that it was seen as a wise investment of time.

I was at two international events last month in Geneva and I had my laptop and a data connection (or two if we count event wifi). I could have listened and live tweeted the events and I could have engaged people socially. I could have engaged with the panel and the speakers.

They want me to use a hashtag. I refuse to use hashtags because a hashtag is not a conversation. A hashtag is metadata. Metadata should be used to help with threading but should not be the conversation. The conversation, comments and thoughts should go directly to the organisation. The impact of a conversation is far stronger than a hashtag.

A hashtag is solitary, is lonely, is disjointed, fails to engage. We see it’s weakness every time an event takes place. I was at one event where I saw that the hashtag only appeared in tweets by the event organiser. The only other place it appeared was in retweets. If you work as a social media marketer you need to engage with people. You need to get people to reply to your tweets, not tweet a hashtag. Event twitter accounts should serve as a conversation hub. They should trigger groups of people at the event and following the event remotely to converse, to share what they think, what they do, who they need to help them.

There are two strengths to twitter that very few people use. These are the ability to connect with like minded people before an event, so that by the time you meet them in person you can proceed with a collaboration rather than small talk and secondly to connect with other people after an event, to establish more personal connections.

Remember that twitter is a 140 character medium. Twitter is great for short conversations and quick updates. It lacks in substance when it comes to sharing content. Facebook, Google Plus are better when what you have to share takes more than 140 characters. Facebook and Google Plus allow you to build connected communities in a way that is impossible on twitter. Both Facebook and Google Plus have threading, have topic separation and more. They are modern web forums. Twitter is a chat room. Use the web forums to have threaded conversations around specific events and panels and use twitter to establish personal connections with event attendees and others.

Yesterday Twitter decided to allow people to follow 5000 twitter accounts. “While it’s entirely possible to see a lot of activity when you’re following 2,000 accounts, the 5,000-user limit increases the chances that you’ll see something interesting.” Social network stickiness relies on familiarity and a personal connection. If you follow 5000 accounts there is an excellent chance that you will fail to personally engage with any of these accounts. As a result twitter will be the place you visit because of hype rather than personal interest.

Twitter is a conversation medium that has identified itself as a broadcast medium which is why there are so many spammers present today. It has encouraged people to have millions of followers, it has encouraged people to follow other people whom there is no chance of personal engagement. They have encouraged their user base to listen rather than interact. Look at the million follower accounts and how they idealise this, rather than the more manageable 300 person limit.

Three or four years ago there was some discussion on the number of people that individuals could know well and that number was low. They said that we could get to know about three hundred people well. This means that if we’re on twitter we should not follow more than three hundred people. We should follow those whom engage with us. We should make time available to those who make time available for us. We should make sure that we have personal connections with as high a percentage of those we engage with in social media as possible.

When twitter was still a social network and twitter celebrities were still normal people we could converse with iJustine, Sarah Austin, Chris Brogan and many others. With Seesmic we could connect with Scoble and Le Meur. In the early days we could create warmer connections because there were fewer of us and attention was not as costly as it is today. Essena O’Neill is one of the people who came to social media too late. She managed to have more than half a million followers which is fantastic for the ego. Half a million followers would make most people happy.

She also set up a website to fight against what she described as the cult of social media. She deleted 2,000 photos on Instagram that, she said, “served no real purpose other than self-promotion”, and scrapped her other social accounts.

Marketers misled people. Shareholders got Social media companies to focus on the wrong thing. Social Media is a social medium. Social media is a method by which for people to communicate with other people with similar passions. Social media is about conversations between individuals. The social media landscape should be about you and I becoming friends. It should be about writing blog posts, sharing images of adventures and more. Social media should complement our physical social life. By Physical social life I only mean the social life with people whose hands we can shake, with people we can hug and with people we can have adventures with.

The idea that each of us should create a mass following is wrong and it is destructive. It is wrong because most of us are not that interesting and we do not travel so much as to find thousands of like minded people. We should focus on a small tight network of people. I found that small tight network through Glocals. For about two years I was part of the Glocals Geneva Scuba diving community and for three years I have been part of the Glocals Activ’events group.

In London social networks got me to participate in tweetups, barcamps, tuttle meetups and more. Each of these events saw me meet with and perpetuate social media friendships that were friendships in the physical world. Some of these friendships are now eight years old. These friendships also saw me at LeWeb and seesmeetups. These friendships are not fleeting. Some of them are over a decade old, from before “Social Media” days.

This shows that if you are honest, if you are open and if you are genuine in your use of social media you can establish friendships. The conversations are an exchange of ideas, loves, passions and concerns. Twitter calls them “followers” but I call them friends. I often speak of “twitter friends” because some platforms are great for news, others are great for sharing images and yet more are good for conversations or debates.

I came back to blogging because I grew tired of the hyposphere. A few weeks ago I started to call Facebook, twitter and mainstream media the Emotional Media. Hard news and information were far harder to find. Conversations and personal connections have also become a distant memory. Social Media has been hijacked by commercial interests to make money for people whom are not aware of the damage they are doing to social networks. I see social networks as a fantastic place for introverts to socialise. I see social networks as a very nice way for introverts to be extroverted, to meet new people, and to create relationships, rather than to sit in the background. Marketers hijacked that space. Essena grew up at the height of the Emotional Media. She was indoctrinated to believe that follower counts, likes, favourites and non conversational measures of success were important. She was never told that social media should be about personal connections, about individuals.

As a person who has been online almost every day since 1996 I grew up with the world wide web and so I have seen it’s progress over the years. I formed my character at the same time as the world wide web and then social media formed their own. Let’s Be Game Changers is interesting because  Essena is part of the generation who was born after the World Wide Web. She came to this space when marketers were distorting children and teenage values. They put importance on the wrong things. Let’s Be Game Changers is a way of opposing the values system instilled by Social media experts and Social media managers. Social media should be about solitary or lonely individuals having personal conversations with their peers. Social media should be a way of getting to know new people. Social media should be about conversations, passions and activities.

Years ago I spoke and thought about the Social Media Living Room. I even bought the domain. The idea of the social media living room is one where we come to a virtual space, an online space and we converse. We share images, videos, thoughts and aspirations with other people. Those virtual interactions become so frequent and so warm that eventually we want to meet in person and when we do a friendship emerges. During the social media Golden Age everyone I met was via Twitter and quite a few more were via Seesmic. During this age geography and nationality did not exist. We were likeminded people meeting internationally. Companies and organisations need to re-create that personal connection so that what I called Emotional Media can once again become Social Media. I want to have conversations. I want to meet new people and work on interesting projects.

 

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Vanity fair is wrong to label Zuck as the top disruptor

Byrichard

Zuckerberg Tops Vanity Fair’s 2015 List of Disruptors

Every successful social network first establishes a friendship network where a tight knit group of people interact with each other on a very frequent basis. In the case of facebook it was uni friends interacting with uni friends from the same campus. On twitter it was people in the same time zone conversing with people in the same city as themselves. It eventually led to face to face meetings and a new network of recognised friends.

The same can be said of Seesmic when it was about “Join the Video conversation”. Notice my avatar… It’s the seesmic racoon. 🙂

Zuck wasn’t a disruptor or genius so much as the right person in the right place at the right time. Nothing he did was innovative. He just packaged it effectively.

As a side note I have noticed that over a number of years the social aspect of twitter has suffered. It no longer feels like a social social network. it feels more like Google Reader.

it’s amusing to see how social networks evolve and revolve from one type of network to another depending on what people want-

Mark Zuckerberg Tops the 2015 New Establishment List—and Snags the October Cover!

I remember when there were dozens of RSS aggregators for the sharing and distribution of blog articles. Over time traditional sources used the same technology. Google Reader and Google News became good sources for getting news stories and information. Facebook and twitter, social networks, decided that conversations were a waste of time and so encouraged their networks to be used as news aggregators. Recently Facebook reached the billion user daily mark.

Amusingly this happened when the social network is at it’s weakest. It’s Unique Selling Point, connecting friends, has been lost. I went back to blogging because I grew tired of the rubbish being shared on twitter, facebook and other social networks.

For years I insisted that social networks were a great way of meeting new friends and finding new business opportunities but as everyone overdid it with followers so the conversation and personal connections decreased.

In the article they state that “Facebook chairman and C.E.O.Mark Zuckerberg has struck deals with The New York Timesand BuzzFeed to publish articles directly into users’ pages.”

I don’t go to facebook for news. I use the NYtimes app, I use Google News, I use news360, scoopinion and other applications. I use the applications because I found the condescending and sensationalist tone used by facebook marketers was offensive. We are a generation of university graduates on a university social network being treated as if we were primary school students. I don’t appreciate it.

I also don’t appreciate the multiple posting of the same articles and tweets in timelines both on twitter and facebook. In theory twitter is an app that you keep open and monitor throughout the day. If something has to be posted several times then congrats on having such a disengaged audience. ;-).

Social Media and Via Ferrata
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Social Media and Via Ferrata

Byrichard

People on linkedin were discussing whether social media campaigns are worth organising and keeping. When it comes to extreme sports such as Via Ferrata, rock climbing and other extreme sports then I believe that the audience is ready and enthusiastic enough for a social media presence to be desirable.

Via Ferrata is an outdoor sport that can be practiced in France, Italy, Spain, Switezrland, Austria, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Peru. As a result of the diverse place where this sport can be carried out so social media became an excellent avenue through which to share information about the sport.

 

I have loved the sport of via ferrata for five years now, half a decade. What I loved about it was the simplicity of the sport. After just two or three climbing lessons and going with a guide once I saw that I could handle via ferrata comfortably without a guide. I always insisted that I would take people with rock climbing experience, not absolute beginners.

Via Ferrata is a specific sport requiring specific equipment and specific experience. It requires a head for heights and an ability to hike for an hour or two before a climb and another hour or two after the climb. As the locations are usually remote it also requires someone with a car and whom can navigate.

Social networks such as Glocals for Geneva and Lausanne, Xdreams, for Geneva specifically and the Via Ferrata Suisse group for the French speaking part of Switzerland are good places to find participants. The first two examples are to connect with the international/english speaking community and the latter is to connect with the French speaking community.

Glocals is a local social network helping the international community in Geneva, Lausanne and other cities to meet up and be active. Through this site you can meet people to work on hangover, meet people to scuba dive and meet people to do outdoor sports such as hiking, climbing, via ferrata, swimming, canyoning and much more. Due to the nature of the social network are spread around Switzerland and the meeting point is usually the event, with car sharing from strategic points.

 

Via Ferrata Suisse is a nice online community for French speaking via ferrata practitioners on Facebook. As they are spread across the French speaking parts of Switzerland they can provide information and tips on via ferrata that are local.

Aside from connecting people social networks and social media are great for the sharing of pictures, personal accounts and textual information about via ferrata. Some people want beautiful landscapes and so pictures will help them select which via ferrata to do. Others are afraid of heights so they will avoid being too far from the ground. A third group will look at how exertional via ferratas will be. I have seen two people run out of energy at Plan Praz and I have seen everyone feel weak by the time they finish the Leukerbad Via Ferrata.

Tourism professionals and equipment manufacturers can benefit from a social media presence. I see that Iloveclimbing, Suunto, PETZL, Mammut and other brands actively share the adventures that either their athletes or enthusiasts of their equipment are enjoying. It’s a great way to make me dream of going to some locations, getting that piece of kit or trying an activity at that time of day.

To give a specific example I have wanted to do the Moléson by night Via Ferrata for years now and have never got around to it. For two or three years it was because of work and this year it was because of the weather and because I had already booked Leukerbad for the weekend it was moved to. Next year I will make it.

I love suunto, Mammut and PETZL. Rather than advertise to the city dweller like Apple, Fitbit and withings do they organise social media campaigns around the great outdoors and around extreme sports. As a result of their social media policy I identify very strongly with their products. In the case of suunto I have dive computers and fitness watches. I understand the passion that their athletes represent in their social media campaigns.

Social media is about socialisation and passion. Via Ferrata is a sport that people feel passionate about but because it requires physical fitness and a head for heights your pre-existing group of friends may not be the best suited for your passion to take off. That’s where social networks and social media can help find new via ferrata, see what to be wary of and meet new people. According to these three parameters Via Ferrata and social media are perfect for each other. Sports companies, tourism offices and transport infrastructure would result from a social media presence.

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The Dumbing Down of mainstream media

Byrichard

Recently I have found mainstream anglo-saxon media much harder to tolerate. A few years ago I went to see 90 films in 9 months. I had no TV and the World Wide Web wasn’t quite as accessible then as it is today. For years I could watch BBC World from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep. I also read articles and blog posts.

I can’t stand the hollywood film output anymore. They are so comfortable with their formulas that within ten minutes I knew the plot line.

I used to read dozens of newspapers a day and dozens of blog posts a day. I noticed that blog posts started to become formulaic and so stopped reading blog after blog. The quality of content went down at the same time as output went up. Every blog post was a Top Ten article.

Newspaper headlines used to provide the audience with information about what the article was about. You’d read the headline, skim the first paragraph and decide what to read next. As Social media became socially acceptable for growing portions of society so we see the decline in headline usefulness. Headlines should answer the who, what where, when, why how questions and engage you as a reader. The Guardian, the BBC, The Independent and other news sources rather than writing headlines about the content of articles write sensationalist headlines that are designed to blackmail you in to clicking a link. Usually the articles hidden behind these headlines are a waste of time. They provide little of value and they assume ignorance of current affairs.

We live in the information age. Within 15 seconds whether you’re sitting at the top of a via ferrata or in a library you can get information on any topic that interests you. Remember that the web is the hypertext markup language. When you write today you can add links to help contextualise the story, you can provide videos and pictures. You can also write in as much depth as you would like.

In the information age I would have liked, and I would have expected that writing would become more demanding. Knowledge would be assumed and context would be easy to provide. When background information is a search engine result away it would be logical to assume that experts and writers could write as if we, the lay reader, were also experts.

Look at the way the refugee crisis is covered. We see terms like “thousands drown in sea” “Fortress Europe should let in more refugees” and many more phrases. These phrases do nothing to inform and educate the audience. They are only entertaining us. They are encouraging prejudice and stereotypes rather than discourse. With unlimited bandwidth, time and space the topic of refugees and migrants could be covered in great depth. Documentaries could be produced to provide context as to why people are pushed from where they lived. Xenophobia is a result of over-simplification. Imagine that tomorrow when you wake up you see François Hollande or David Cameron in Calais speaking with refugees. What effect would that have on the national debates of migration? We see ourselves as liberals and we see ourselves as citizens of the world. Why, as citizens of the world do we never see our leaders visit refugees? Let’s forget the status quo and let’s go for a contextualised actuality. (Actuality, Actualité, french for news. I chose not to use the stigmatised word Reality).

Another example of the dumbing down is the TWIT network. I used to love listening to those podcasts. I would listen to at least five or six of their programs a week. TWIT, Macbreak weekly and others. I started to lose interest when they switched to video and my interest decayed completely by the time it was more chit chat than news. Editing gave their shows value. Without editing you’re wasting an hour and a half of listening time.

Media production and advertising revenue is based on the “Lowest Common Denominator” theory. The simpler content is to understand the more views it will get. The more views it gets the more valuable it is. When media assets are owned by the financial sector and when giving dividends to share holders is more important than value to costumers so you get the erosion of quality. This erosion in quality means chasing a greater number of eyeballs with an ever decreasing quality of content. The Guardian, the BBC and other “mainstream media” companies have fallen in to the trap. They don’t need the money, they’re subsidised, but they need the eyeballs to justify their funding nonetheless.

If the mainstream media want to destroy themselves then that’s fine. In theory. In practice this leaches in to the social media landscape. As an early adopter I join social networks and social media distribution platforms in their early days, when the intellectual, entrepreneurial and curious people are around. Conversations and friendships make empty social networks look and feel lively. As users engage stickiness grows. As stickiness increases so value increases. Look at Twitter and Facebook as prime examples. Twitter was a fantastic conversation tool in it’s early days, so fantastic that for the first time in a social network I would meet with users every week at it’s peak. Facebook was a uni friend network. We had all partied together and as we knew each other well we could be open and social in a closed network. When advertisers, social media gremlins and PR professionals came in to these landscapes so the conversation chased the rabbit down the hole of the lowest common denominator. Conversations diluted and friendships decayed to the point where trolling became standard.

The dumbing down of the mainstream media led to the decline in sociability and friendliness on social networks at a time when social media became mainstream. As a positive last thought everything is cyclical. We will see mainstream media smarten up again. We will go back to long form articles, and we will go back to interesting film plots.

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Social networks and project collaboration

Byrichard

Jacques Yves Cousteau’s documentaries would have done well in the social media age, especially if the social media age moved away from profit and money. Imagine that social media companies such as Facebook and twitter were Not For Profit Organisations and imagine that instead of having advertisers they had sponsors. The quality of content and discussion would increase and the time wasting element that so many people worry about would be gone.

Alexandra Cousteau, grand daughter of Jacques Yves Cousteau is on twitter and she shares articles related to conservation and related topics. Not for profit organisations such as MSF and UN organisations such as the United Nations Development program all share content and articles that provide their followers with valuable resources for bringing conversations forward.

Social networks should be seen as anything but a waste of time. Their purpose would be to find clients, to find collaborators and to find mentors. In having these three resources finding new projects, employment and collaboration opportunities would increase. We would eliminate viral videos, tabloid content and keep high value, high return on investment prospects. Rather than PR and marketing specialists flooding our timelines with emotional but useless content we would have high value content worth responding too.

The aim would be to demonstrate our strengths in a high brow environment where conversations are possible and encouraged. From the time I was ten years old I have lived in the international community, between school, where I worked, university and more. As a result friends are distributed around the world rather than driving distance. Imagine that this network stopped seeing social networks as tabloid as commercial and a waste of time and instead saw them as useful work tools.

For me this is nothing new. When I was in London when twitter was in it’s infancy and when facebook too was in it’s infancy I saw both social networks as networking tools. I met hundreds of people via both networks and I continue to do this today but at a less efficient pace than I would like.

The aim would be that for every four or five days of social media use I would get two or three in person meetings with people to discuss projects and collaborations. I would also like to be inspired and encouraged to work on specific projects.

The Game Ingress by Niantic labs is a perfect example of what I would like to see within a professional context. Through the game Ingress I have met people in Paris, Fribourg, Lausanne and Geneva to mention just a few. If I go to Paris on the 22nd I can meet agents. If I follow mission days or First Saturdays then I can meet people in a number of cities. I mention this because although ingress is not a professional network it is still a project network. It requires geographically based teams to collaborate to achieve goals. If we could distribute that kind of network for documentary production and collaboration then employability and familiarity would both benefit.

It’s a shame that with all of the communication tools we have today we see social networks such as facebook and twitter as PR and marketing tools rather than collaboration and relationship tools. I have web designers, musicians, camera operators, writers, journalists, photographers, fundraisers, financial analysts and digital analysts as friends on Facebook and yet it is hard to see what people are working on. Imagine social networks that are optimised to benefit from your existing network.

 

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The Lowest Common Denominator

Byrichard

When animated gifs were new and overused on geocities they were tiring. They were used by people whose homes are surely filled with kitsch. Facebook, with it’s declining user engagement decided that it would join the “me too” bandwagon. As a result of this we will see a noisier unsociable feed.

Twitter has made retweets confusing today. When something is retweeted or commented on you want to see the relevant tweet with the comment. As retweets are today we see a comment and a hyperlink. That comment and hyperlink are useless as they require you to click through to understand. In some circles this would be seen as spam. Users must always know where the link they are clicking is taking them.

I look forward to finding conversation sites where user interactions are the reason for the network to be in existence. At the moment too many “social networks” have encouraged spammy behaviour rather than conversation. As the social networks are filled with junk so the statement that “social media websites are a waste of time” is being made clearer every day.

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is twitter changing your blogging habits? – A 2008 response

Byrichard

Yes and no. Twitter is replacing instant messaging and chatrooms. It’s an open method by which for people to communicate instantly with others. It’s also about the overheard conversation although that term has disappeared.

What does “overheard” mean? Well simply that whenever two people discuss a topic hundreds of people are following this conversation and when they decide they have an opinion they can cut in. They do have that 140 character limit though, so they need to get to the point is efficiently as possible.

When that isn’t possible then they can do the next best thing. Write a comment in a blog post or even write a blog entry of their own where the conversation that took place on twitter is synthesised into a more digestible chunk of information.

As a result twitter is changing people’s blogging habits but the question is why people want to chat publicly rather than in an enclosed space. Today people like transparency.

Disclaimer: This is a post from the 28th of Octobre 2008. An unpublished post

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Social conversations and the social media

Byrichard

If you read “How to Win Friends and Influence People” you see how important it is to take notice of other people, to be positive and to be interested in what they are doing. That can be a challenge for everyone. We all have different priorities so putting other people first is a challenge.

The World Wide Web is a place where we can listen and talk at the same time. We listen to a conversation and then we comment. We can start our own conversation and wait for others to see it and respond. As a result we are both engaging with others and letting others engage with us. There is a bilateral trade which leaves both parties feeling good.

Social media, today a misnomer, was a conversation place. Everyone talked with everyone and everyone became familiar with everyone else. The Global Village that Marshall McLuhan wrote about looked like it would become a reality.

At the time when this reality looked the most feasible was the time before mobile phones and proper data plans. At this time we used computers from a fixed location, either at home, an office, university or other places. With Wifi we had some freedom but nowhere the freedom that smart phones and data plans have provided us with.

That’s why people’s feeling that mobile phones are disconnecting people is such a ridiculous notion. In my vision of the world, in the adoption cycle that I observe the mobile phone is the great connector. We meet people online, we appreciate them, we meet them in person. Seesmic and the early days of twitter were very good tools for this lifestyle.

As data plans included more and more data so it would follow that social media websites would be about individual to individual conversation. It would logically follow that people would feel more at ease conversing online as their friends adopt the technology and have chats. Facebook, twitter and Google Plus should be social web forums where people are interested in the people they follow.

What I see, as data plans and smartphone adoption rises is the opposite. People share links and promote rather than converse. Social media should be rebranded as Ego Media, brand media or advertising media. The platforms that should have made us conversational have been overtaken by advertising.

It’s a good time to continue blogging. It’s a monologue until you contribute a comment. The World Wide Web is a de-centralised conversation tool and we move from platform to platform looking for the places where the personal connections are strongest. As the social media days fade in to history now is the time for each of us to blog, to write about what we feel passionate about.

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Pride and media consumption

Byrichard

I enjoyed reading the Unbearable Lightness of Being so much that I read every book by Milan Kundera. I also read every book by Albert Camus because I enjoyed reading La Peste so much. Laura M. Holson wrote an article about “Unplugging without FOMO” which I skimmed after someone on twitter commented on twitter that Screen Shot 2015-03-29 at 18.45.06

and I strongly disagree with this person’s view. It brings us to the conversation about high and low culture. I take the view that media consumption should be focused on high culture. For my dissertation I watched hundreds of documentaries. I watched every David Attenborough documentary, every Jacques Yves Cousteau documentary. I read many books and articles on the topic of the documentary genre and as a result I take pride in the knowledge that I have acquired in the process.

When I skimmed through the article I saw that the discussions were about low culture, about tabloid topics. They speak about things that I would never discuss as they are of no importance or interest. These are things that have no effect on my quality of life.

At the same time I do feel the usual regret. Mid to late adopters came to social media, made it tabloid and then complain about the stream which they and their friends generated. In my childhood I read encyclopedia articles during breakfast, as a teen I spent hours in computer rooms learning about webmastering and search engine optimisation before others were interested. I was experimenting with video compression tools in the late 1990s and gained a deep understanding of the tools that would lead from new media to social media. The conversations were about culture and people took a constructive attitude.

From 2009 onwards I saw the shift away from personal conversations between friends to the hunt for followers and the loss of the personal connection and I blogged about it. As I went back to read the article about unplugging so I see a reaction to what I have been saying for years now. Articles are being written for people with no staying power. Social networks are becoming broadcast rather than exchange and the superficiality of the web is driving people away.

I am happy that social media and microblogging are beyond their sell by date because it means that I can give time up to blogging once again. I can once again discuss topics that interest me in long form. It means that we will spend more time reading, more time learning once again. That is the beauty of the shift away from social media.

In reality I have nothing to gain from participating in the Meme media. Même media, the Same media. The media where people use hashtags to be certain that they are in the flock, the flock of hashtag users rather than conversationalists.

If I can’t converse I will have a monologue and people who are like minded will find me and we shall converse away from the madding crowd. Someday I will read that book. I love to read and I love to write. Today I am doing both as it’s raining outside.

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