Social Media - simplier, similar prosumers

John Scanlon  May 25 2010 12:46:50 AM

Social Media has grown enormously  around the world this year with the main players being Facebook, Twitter, ????????? (Russia), Renren (China).  It is not only the young signing up but it is also inter-generational, with seniors and house wives and families signing up.  It is pervasive, also on netbooks and iPads.  It is inter-connected to other web services and application providers.  Generation Y & Z utilise social media constantly and consider email old hat. It has clear benefits in aiding communications between families, friends, organisations and like minded groups.

It can really enhance our social communications, ...right?

Amongst the rush on use these new tools (200 million new users in the past year world wide), we are all still learning how Social Media will impact us for the long term.  The upside is terrific.  We can all communicate and stay in contact or informed in a much more fun way, easily sharing more of our lives through rich media.  We can follow distant friends and family more closely.  Our social connectivity will grow.  This helps us to be more human and happier people.

On the down side though, there are sinister issues.   Social media competes with each other and for our attention. It becomes better and better at reaching some of our psychological instincts.  Because it taps these social areas in us, it easily sneaks past our normal environmental anti-trust barriers.  We share enthusiastically, ..why not, everyone else is. Thus do our lives become over exposed.  

We become exposed to any sort of predatory tactics. Those with criminal intent quickly develop strategies to enact financial fraud, or they groom their victims - with deadly consequences.  Those with commercial intent quickly develop strategies to ingratiate and commercialise customers like never before.  We become more material and beholden to consumerism.  We don't even know that these commercial forces are shaping our thoughts because they become so implicit in our interactions.

The Social Media frameworks that we use enhance our online communications absolutely wonderfully compared to times past. However, these frameworks are still very limiting to the overall human experience.  How we evolved for human to human communications is subtly different to how we behave for online social communications.  This can be both good and bad.  

We simplify our emotions for online communications into polarised instincts - happy, LOL, sad, like, angry.  The full gambet of emotions that we use to communicate in person cannot be transferred online.  The online communications are 'restricted in their emotional feedback' and 'contain a delay in their emotional feedback'.  This in fact reduces our emotionally range in these interactions and it places our emotional responses into simple base camps only.  

We forget too that the written word is permanent and transferable, it is not ephemeral and immediately reactive. Therefore, it contains a its own special power in communication.  We forget this because we forgot formal written communications. We replaced it instead with verbal written communications in our online, mobile world.  SMS speak. Short responses. Simple sentences.  No room or time for thoughtful paragraphs with more meaningful communications.  We scan and quickly filter on LOL, Like, Sad, Angry. (Time strapped scanning relies more on emotional responses counted in milliseconds then it does on logical responses.)

With simplified online emotions we seek forth in our Social Media frameworks looking for our simplified emotional interactions. Like - :-) - LOL.

We know that on the internet popularity is the winner. Popularity feeds itself to become more popular. It goes viral. We can be more in touch with popularity online then ever before online and you can't avoid celebrity, mostly trash for its own sake. We can become popular too, Social Networks encourage this and make it easier. Be my friend. I follow you. You are popular.  I copy you, I become popular too. Thus, on these frameworks we become more homogenised.  Our behaviour becomes more similar.

We will learn and adapt fast. But we may become different people.  We will be lesser people? We will become better consumers online. We will also become 'prosumers' (the opposite of consumers).  Which is, we will learn the art of self promotion online.  We will "customise our private moments online for the edification of potential buyers online"* (Lee Siegel).  The potential buyers are our social networks, customers, business partners and present or future employers.
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