social media

For years now we've seen people entrenched in, married to, paid by or validated by old media attack new media, "those bloggers," Twitter, Facebook … the Internet in general. It's been fading lately as publishers especially have started to embrace and integrate new media into their publishing strategies. But there are still holdouts, many of whom seem not just ignorant but willfully ignorant.

Malcolm Gladwell's weak dismissal of "weak ties"

Gladwell's New Yorker article was the buzz on Twitter. One excerpt:

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.

…proving that old media journalists are as adept as anyone in the straw-man rhetorical technique.

I remember high school. The socialites — the "soshes" or soc's or however you would spell the nickname (I never learned) — were the in crowd. The cheerleaders, the football players, the glamorous crowd who looked down on the rest of us. Something like Heathers, only moreso and without the violence. When it came to who mattered in school, they were the arbiters. The rest of us, no matter how many friends we had, no matter how talented we were, no matter how smart we were (or should I rather say because of being smart) amounted to anything in the dominant high school culture. I hated it. I turned away from it. My friends and I would scorn the soc's in some lame attempt at payback, as if they cared. But it hurt to be disregarded so. Even though I didn't even really like them.

We outgrew it, of course. Some more quickly than others.

Updated below.

So today's buzz is about Buzz, Google's new Friendfeed-kind of thing announced just an hour or so ago. Jeremiah Owyang blogged some quick thoughts, including this:

For consumers, the risk of privacy will continue to be at top of mind. Although the features allow for sharing only with friends or in public. expect more consumer groups to express concern. Overtime, this will become moot as the next generation of consumers continues to share in public.

Setting aside his prediction that privacy will become "moot" — which I don't believe is necessarily true, given that we're still in the bedazzled phase of experiencing social media's integration with our daily lives — as I look at my own use of Google, Twitter, etc., Buzz could turn out to be the means towards breaking down my contacts silos.

In the beginning, the world was offline. The past was just what we could remember. Conversations faded. Introductions to others slipped into the realm of unnamed faces and disconnected anecdotes. Jokes were heard and forgotten. Photos bleached out and negative film turned to dust. News clippings crumbled. Documents misplaced were unfindable. Address books lost were irreplaceable. What happened in Las Vegas really did stay in Las Vegas.

Then there was the Internet and all that began to change. The World-Wide Web came to be, and we all became potential publishers. With few exceptions in the larger-business realm, the first websites were no more than billboards. Then they were brochures. Then in the late '90s blogging began. In the '00s, walled-off chatrooms siloed off within services like AOL and Compuserve were replaced by more open communities ... and then social networks. (Walled-off social networks like Facebook opened up into full-blown social networks.) Before we knew it, we were emailing, chatting, shopping, researching, bookmarking, socializing, podcasting, showing videos, sharing, advising, asking, boasting, laughing, crying, raging, raving online.