A throwaway line I posted to Twitter yesterday seems to have hit a nerve, because it was retweeted copiously:Officially bored of the phrase "social media" now. I'm just going to call it "media" and everything else can be "anti-social media".The trigger for the post was an overheard conversation in the office that seemed to designate social media as something "other" to what we are doing on the rest of the site, a concept which is, at best, in error and, at worst, positively dangerous. It's only our blinkers from working in traditional media that allow us to see the web this way, as a social bit and a traditional publishing bit, but it's a fallacy. On the web, social media is media. The ability to share, comment, discuss and annotate to fundamental to the way publishing is developing on the internet, and we have to treat the new medium as what it is, not what some of us wish it was.
On one of the training course I teach in sunny Sutton, I make the point
that, from its earliest days, the internet was a social medium: usenet, irc, BBSes,
e-mail discussion lists and forums were all early ways of socialising
the internet experience. We in the traditional media took a detour into
shovelware websites that emulated our print products, while the web got
on with inventing new forms of social publishing, like blogs, wikis,
social networks and microblogging. And now we have to join in, or be
left in the dust. Social media isn't some bolt-on to a publishing
strategy - it is the publishing strategy for the web. It
doesn't matter if it's journalism in a blog, content curating through
social networks, or workflow tools with a social graph attached, the
ability to do things in concert with others is the defining feature of
the web, and using "social media" in opposition to "media" makes it too
easy to forget that.
Incidentally, I don't see "anti-social media" as an insult. There are times when I want to sit down and read a book or magazine all on my own. That's great. But it's not the growth market. That's the web. That's the social publishing envirnment.
Incidentally, I don't see "anti-social media" as an insult. There are times when I want to sit down and read a book or magazine all on my own. That's great. But it's not the growth market. That's the web. That's the social publishing envirnment.
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