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Social Media
Jul. 30th, 2009 09:34 amIt’s rewarding, for a moment, to step back and consider the history of social media on the internet. I suppose that the first time many people encountered something like that was back in the 1990s with usenet and, slightly later, groups on yahoo. By the turn of the century blogging was starting to appear in one form or another, with dedicated sites (the first I remember encountering was Things my girlfriend and I have argued about) and from there it was an inevitable step for companies to monetarise the blogging generation with services like Blogger or LiveJournal.
The problem with blogging is that it requires constant generation of material to work and many people lack the motivation or creativity to do that so the next step was MySpace, where you could converse and post pictures, but the option to generate content with any depth wasn’t really built into the format. From MySpace we move to Facebook, which is big on short updates and comments but even shorter on effort and thence the inevitable step to twitter.
What becomes clear when you think about it is that as new social media have developed they’ve had less about content and ideas and more about self-validation and comment. To browse twitter is truly to feel the abyss staring right back at you.
As social media have developed, the authorities have run to keep up to try and engage with a new generation of people; MPs and senior public figures started writing blogs, then they got onto MySpace and Facebook – and yesterday the government released a 5,000 word policy document to civil servants on how to write twitters. 5,000 words on how to write something no more than 140 characters long is pretty impressive going. I have to wonder how much someone was paid to write it.
The thing is, though, as the government is trying to get some of that twitter action that can only mean one thing: Twitter is dead.
There’s nothing worse than The Man trying to engage with ‘the kids’ by adapting their media. It’s like coming home when you’re fourteen and finding your parents listening to your favourite band, snapping their fingers and saying “Heyyy – these hepcats are groovy”. It’s just cripplingly embarrassing. Moreover the thought of Gordon Brown browsing your comments is just unsettlingly creepy – like that time I got thrown out of the boy scouts (last week, when they found me hiding in the cupboard with a camera).
So what’s next? If Microblogging has been killed stone dead by the government writing a policy document declaring itself hip to the jive of the kids with their funky beat platters, something must follow and, as the pattern seems to be one of less and less content, the answer suggests itself to me: Nanoblogging.
As I’m always at the forefront of any technological revolution, I declare my LJ today to be the world’s first Nanoblog. I want you all to tell me what you’re doing right now in eight characters or less.
It’s worth it to be at the start of the revolution, right?
The problem with blogging is that it requires constant generation of material to work and many people lack the motivation or creativity to do that so the next step was MySpace, where you could converse and post pictures, but the option to generate content with any depth wasn’t really built into the format. From MySpace we move to Facebook, which is big on short updates and comments but even shorter on effort and thence the inevitable step to twitter.
What becomes clear when you think about it is that as new social media have developed they’ve had less about content and ideas and more about self-validation and comment. To browse twitter is truly to feel the abyss staring right back at you.
As social media have developed, the authorities have run to keep up to try and engage with a new generation of people; MPs and senior public figures started writing blogs, then they got onto MySpace and Facebook – and yesterday the government released a 5,000 word policy document to civil servants on how to write twitters. 5,000 words on how to write something no more than 140 characters long is pretty impressive going. I have to wonder how much someone was paid to write it.
The thing is, though, as the government is trying to get some of that twitter action that can only mean one thing: Twitter is dead.
There’s nothing worse than The Man trying to engage with ‘the kids’ by adapting their media. It’s like coming home when you’re fourteen and finding your parents listening to your favourite band, snapping their fingers and saying “Heyyy – these hepcats are groovy”. It’s just cripplingly embarrassing. Moreover the thought of Gordon Brown browsing your comments is just unsettlingly creepy – like that time I got thrown out of the boy scouts (last week, when they found me hiding in the cupboard with a camera).
So what’s next? If Microblogging has been killed stone dead by the government writing a policy document declaring itself hip to the jive of the kids with their funky beat platters, something must follow and, as the pattern seems to be one of less and less content, the answer suggests itself to me: Nanoblogging.
As I’m always at the forefront of any technological revolution, I declare my LJ today to be the world’s first Nanoblog. I want you all to tell me what you’re doing right now in eight characters or less.
It’s worth it to be at the start of the revolution, right?
