What Is Social Media?

With Jesper diving directly into the nuts and bolts of social media, covering areas such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication)  and integrating Linkedin and Twitter accounts, I thought it worthwhile to attempt a preliminary and contrastive introduction of the term.

Social media is contested territory, so please consider the following definitions my pesonal take on the subject. The primary objective is to find out whether we’re all on the same page — or not…

The State of  the Media Landscape

Numerous media experts have pointed out that we’re witnessing a democratization(1) of the media landscape. Consumers have turned into users and producers, and web 2.0 technologies enable everyone to cheaply or freely create their own media channel: facebook profiles, blogs, podcasts, vlogs, microblogs. Industrial media placed media power in the hands of few people — newspaper owners, broadcast companies, national radios. The democratization process leads to proliferation, which, in turn, leads to clutter.

Technorati analyses have shown that during a period of three months last year, 7 million blogs were created — the blogs contained 900,000 posts — this generation of new media channels took place during one 24 hour period.

Attention has become a scarcity. If one subscribes to a mild kind of linguistic determinism, it could be argued that by changing how we communicate — and how information can be aggregated, syndicated, dissemminated & analyzed — we change society.

A McCann survey has shown that 83% watch video clips on a regular basis. 78% read blogs. 57% are members of social networks. The percentage of RSS users has grown from 15% to 39% in a year. Podcast have become mainstream.

The Darwinian struggle for attention is taking place between the search engines, offering contextual and relevant results, the social networks, offering collaboration & social proof platforms, and the recommendation engines, offering powerful endorsement platforms.

Industrial Media

Writing writers
Limited number of media channels
Editorial control
High barrier of entry
Static architecture
Passive consumers
Expert proof
Expert intelligence

Social Media

Writing readers
Proliferation of media channels
Messages take on lives of their own
Low barrier of entry
Liquid archicture
Active user producers
Social proof
Collective intelligence

Notes:
1. “What characterizes the networked information economy is that decentralized individual action – specifically, new and important cooperative and coordinate action carried out through radically distributed, nonmarket mechanisms that do not depend on proprietary strategies – plays a much greater role than it did, or could have, in the industrial information economy” Benkler, Yochai (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.

What Is Social Media was written By Kasper Bergholt.