Is social media, and the tools we use to interact with it, really changing anything?
For all we talk about how things like Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and blogs are changing the landscape are we really doing anything any different that so-called traditional media.
An interesting viewpoint on this from Roy Bragg
In the old days, you got news three ways. Now you can get it four ways, and the fourth way — the Web — is subdivided into Web sites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc. But the news, for the most part, still comes from the same old places.
Case in point: Much was made of the importance of Twitter in the post-election meltdown in Iran and how the Twitter community was mobilized.
Not quite.
The immediate news came from citizen-journalists, getting the crap kicked out of them, in the riots. That was Twitter in action and that is a major breakthrough. But after that…not so much.
The context came from professional journalists who took the time to do interviews in the hours and days that followed in traditional media outlets.
The vast majority of tweets about the Iranian riots, however, were re-tweets of those initial reports and, later, re-tweets of the traditional media reports.
That’s not a social media revolution. That’s an e-coffee klatch.
Social media isn’t killing traditional media. Traditional media has been killing itself for 30 years. Social media is just feeding off traditional media’s emaciated carcass.
Nor is social media revolutionizing anything. It’s just elbowing it’s way into a place at the same old table. That’s not a social media revolution.
That’s a mass media evolution.
Just something to think about.
With the increasing popularity of the so-called real-time web social media mucky-mucks have been writing about how things like blogs and RSS is dead. If not dead then at the very least being minimized as services like 
