This whole Social Media game is becoming increasingly very depressing. I’ve really tried to get past this but instead the feeling only becomes more ingrained. I have tried to slough it off as just a passing phase as a result of too many big old hot air balloons to poke holes in; but it is more than that I think.
After all when you hear a bunch of developers cheering because Facebook has removed a key user data protection element in their insatiable quest to control as much of the Social Web as possible you have to wonder just who is the Web for anymore.
When you hear terms like we’re doing this to improve the social experience; which if anyone decides to look past the warm and fuzzy buzzwords, it is easy to see that this is more about improving the company’s social experience and ability to monetize our activity on the Web. What it isn’t about is us saying what will make our experience better and when we raise questions we are either lumped in with the open web freetards (like it’s a bad thing) or we’re some sort of troglodytes.
Sometimes it feels like Social Media is nothing more than one great big social experiment to see just how far we can be made to shift our perception of what privacy is. It isn’t a shift that is truly benefiting us in anyway. Is it really that important to know immediately what some person who has followed you is listening to? Is it really necessary that we know what some person who has friended you has spent or bought.
Any perceived value of things like this are only so because we are told that there is a value to knowing all this stuff immediately as it happens.
Oh there is a value but it isn’t to you or me because seriously just how much value are you getting by the tsunami of information that is flowing at you in real time from a thousand people, a hundred thousand people, or even a few hundred. Not to mention that the only reason you know these people, say 99% of them, is because you clicked on a follow or friend button somewhere.
No, the real value for all this information is to those whose jobs it is to convince us that privacy has changed, that we are social, that we all need to be a part of some larger social experience.
However the fact that people are so willing to blindly trade away their information and activity in exchange for some presumed social activity provided by companies in the business of making money from that information and activity – well that is depressing.
Where is the social technology, the social news, the social web?
Instead we get networks flooded by marketers looking for ways to manipulate us all under the guise of having conversations. Instead we get flooded with follow and friend requests where 4 out of 5 are spammers or marketers. Instead we get a Web that is being treated like a business acquisition where we are nothing more than shares to be bought and sold.
This is no longer your web or my web but rather the pitched corporate battle ground where things like privacy are looked upon as the mutual enemy and that we need to be coerced into believing that these companies know what is best for us.
It doesn’t matter that the Web is slowly becoming one or two off/on switches that control our online identity which can disappear should be ever be perceived to have stepped out of line. Our identity has become a commodity, which in itself is depressing but further compounded by the fact we don’t seem to care that it isn’t us controlling those switches.
The common refrain the past few days is that Facebook is on a march to take over the social web. The only problem is that the social web has already been taken over. It has been taken over by corporations, their marketers, PR firms and Facebook, and as much as they would love to con us into believing it is all about the conversation the reality it is all about funneling us into things like Facebook, Twitter and any number of cool networks.
In sort – Social Media is becoming Facebook Media, Corporate Media, Marketing Media … and that is depressing.
[...] Blippy et al in the news for scraping and flogging user data to turn a quick buck, Steven Hodson asks the question that is on many observer's minds – what exactly is social media for: After all when you hear a [...]
It’s ironic that flagrantly commercial Google AdSense ads frame your rant against those putrid marketers despoiling the purity of all those not for profit social networking sites.
My suggestion to avoid depression: go read a book.
isn’t irony a wonderful thing just like all the ironic things I could say about your comment but then you probably work for free so the effort would be lost on you.
The Internet has long been a strange and at times awkward beast to me. I have been using it for some 15 years and it has gone through some tremendous changes, Not all of them good. IMHO.
Security has always been a problem. At least with this change, it is in our face and we can possibly do something about it.
I think Greed has a lot to do with what Facebook has done. They may suffer for it in the long run, but for now I think they are going to get what they can out of the situation.
I’ve been around since the days of BBSes and FidoNET so like you I have seen some changes and a lot of repetition under the guise of doing something new.
Greed or a Bill Gates complex?
I disagree.
Whilst marketers have used the internet massively to their advantage the power still lies with the users, as at any point they can decide to just leave. For example within several weeks the facebook group that suggests facebook will start charging and asks people to sign up to stop it, has gained 1 million members. Bebo’s market share collapsed for no other real reason than facebook appeared. Only now is Twitter starting to monetise at all, yet it’s doing fine and still growing.
And campaigns like the stop malaria campaign, Red nose day and Rage against the Machine for xmaas no1 have demonstrated that it is the users that provide the largest and most powerful social actions.
[...] 2 Tweets Shooting at Bubbles – Getting depressed with this whole Social Media thing The corner of the Internet where a cranky old fart takes aim at Social Media silliness and other [...]
I learned how for businesses to truly capitalize with social media they must create content. I learned this via many presentations by business people at Lunch Ann Arbor Marketers(LA2M), we were just trying to make sense of social media. Why should it be any different for individuals? I hear of people quiting FB. I hear of people exploring total online identity control. In the end it seems rather simple, produce your own content. Relying on “social media” to create anything other than connections just doesn’t add up. I just hope I can get more than just my new foodblog up and running; sooner rather than later.
LivingSocial recently advertised: if three of your friends buy this deal, yours is free! If I were splitting a deal with three people who were really my friends, I’d split the discount four ways. What’s so laudably “social” about this kind of appeal to divisive self-interest? But the difference between a shill and a person is still pretty easy to discern on craigslist, chowhound, etc.
[...] is social media just marketing in disguise? tags: new media older » Eyesight Test for the Military Service Enrollment » No [...]
A proposal for peer-to-peer online social networking:
It is now evident that Facebook intends to create an alternate Internet where its hundreds of millions of users generate content (links, photos, connections, geo-tags) that will be analyzed to manipulate the information presented to you – your user experience. Fortunately, there is nothing about Internet design that prevents private, decentralized, noncommercial social networking.
Current models of online social networking have a number of serious flaws:
• Inflexible
• Mediated
• Filtered
• Nonsecure
• Server-side
• For-profit
• Etc.
A better approach would be:
• Private
• Flexible
• Client-side
• Collaborative
• Idiosyncratic
• Community curated
• Archived
• Searchable
I propose Google Waves as an existing, viable alternative to Facebook that could be implemented almost immediately.
Google Waves are private web pages that work pretty much like email. Only people who have been invited to join the wave can access this web page. Once you have joined a wave you can collaborate on it in real time and over time, and anything you can do with a web page, you can work together to do with your wave.
Here’s how it works. Instead of having Facebook accounts, you and your connections will have wave accounts, which are like email accounts. You just create a wave and invite all your connections to join it. Now everyone can collaborate on everyone else’s wave. Whenever there is something new on a wave, your wave client will notify you, just like email.
Waves can be as simple or elaborate as you like, but it’s really easy to have sections for posting and commenting, chat, video conferencing, galleries and albums, embedded video, news feeds, anything. Unlike email, there is only one version of a wave, and it is updated in real time. Any change to a wave immediately shows up for everyone who is part of that wave.
If you drop audio or video into a wave, it shows up for anyone else with that wave open, so you can watch video together, or spin records for each other, or write a book, or give a workshop, or whatever!
When you’re watching Youtube videos, you can drop embed code into your social networking wave and watch from there with anyone else who stops by, and you’ll leave a history that your connections can follow up on later if they want. Waves are searchable and can be played back and forth through time so you can see what you missed as it happened while you were away.
Waves are completely private, or at least as private as email. Waves are not mediated by a business and their contents are not mined and sold and the user experience manipulated for commercial purposes. Waves can be served from anywhere, just like any web page or email, so online social networking can be arbitrarily local and distributed and completely under the control of the user.
At the extreme in personal control, we could each configure our own computer as a little wave server and have primary control of our social networking server logs. Less extreme than this, any community or association that’s used to serving email could as easily and securely serve waves to their group.
Widespread adoption of waves would automatically reclaim a lot of user privacy and personal responsibility for online communications of every kind. The contents cannot be mined by outside interests without committing criminal acts – waves are as private as email.
Waves give you and your connections complete control over your social networking experience, and real opportunities for creative collaboration. A wave can be email, telephone, IM, videophone, collaboration platform, art form, performance venue. Transitioning to waves appears to be a good strategy toward a collaborative social web that is peer-to-peer rather than server-client.