Libraries, diaries, newsagents & pubs

Social media tools are nothing more than existing concepts that have been adapted for the worldwide web.  The net result is that more people across the globe can communicate in the moment and fundamentally that’s what all of the excitement is about – size apparently does matter!

Remember the good old library – a place where anyone could access collective or commonly held wisdom on a variety of topics?  Imagine that instead of a date stamp at the front of the book, each person that has read it could leave a comment that either enhanced or contradicted the content – here, you have Wikipedia.  An online library of information where anyone can add a comment regardless of whether they know or understand the subject matter.  The reliability of the information is governed literally by the collective wisdom – inconsistencies are avoided through the sheer number of experts interested and therefore writing about that topic.

Consider what has been learnt about the lives of ordinary people from the likes of Samuel Pepys or Anne Frank.  Imagine what more we might have learned if they had also decorated the covers of their diaries with pictures of their favourite people, pets, plays, music or books and that their friends and relatives had left comments pertinent to their diary entries.  Facebook is just that – a social space to share your thoughts with your select group of friends.

Blogging or web logging, to give it its correct term, is really just pyramid journalism.  You might remember the idea of pyramid selling where person 1 recruited two other people to sell and persons 2 & 3 recruited two other people to sell and so on until person 1 became incredibly rich.  The same principle is at work with blogging (without the rich bit).  You may decide that you are an authority on potato growing so you write an article on how to grow great potatoes and tell all of your friends at the allotment to read it on your blog.  Next week you might write an article on the best insecticide to use and then an article on which garden forks are best suited to potato crops and so on.  Each time you write an article you tell your friends, who read it, find it useful and tell their potato growing friends to also read your blog, who tell their friends etc.  Over time lots of people are reading your articles and you have become a recognised authority on the subject of potato growing.  Before social media your only chance to be an authority would have been if you had graced the cover of Gardener’s World in newsagents across the country!

Twittering adopts the same principle as blogging but is much more immediate and best suited to one-liners.  For tweets think of two blokes having a chat in a pub: “I went to see that new comedian at the club last night, he was great”, “I really laughed at the joke about the elephant and the monkey”.  Effectively they are sharing the highlights of their day with anyone who happens to be listening in the bar at that time.  The potential downside with Twitter of course, is that there isn’t any beer!