Came on-board as Communications and Social Media Manager with IS, and I've been quite busy negotiating the landscape of the nonprofit sector, while trying to negotiate the streets in northwest DC. I've got the number and letter streets down now, which makes a lot of sense. The only problem is that I'm constantly crossing state streets that don't seem to have much rhyme or reason. I'm sure if I were a crow, it would make a lot of sense. But, for a legally blind pedestrian, it's a bit confusing; especially for someone who called New York home for the past four years.
New towns are great for becoming disoriented. The same is true for new social media. I've been researching a lot of what folks call the "next big thing," their way of saying what will bring Twitter or Facebook down from their status as King of the Mountain. And, I find myself wondering if what we really need is the next big thing?
It's natural for the free market to continue exploring uncharted territory. Otherwise, it becomes that classic Woody Allen line from Annie Hall, a "dead shark." Though, what happens when the free market pushes social interaction. If social media truly wishes to engage into the deepest facets of society, there requires growth and stability. Sure, the next big thing might have cool bells and whistles, but does it mean that Facebook is dead?
Of course, Myspace users might be saying this already. But, I think one of the big mistakes MySpace made was that it was unable to adapt to the changing times If society revolves around cities in the real world, cyber society revolves around web portals. On one end, as in the case of MySpace, a city that doesn't adapt to changing times is likely to fall into the sea, become something for historians to write about hundreds of years from now, which in cyber years is next December. Take Detroit, for instance, which envisioned itself as a town that would surpass New York City during the 1920s, only to announce the other week that it was decreasing its size drastically after 1,000,000 people moved out during the past generation.
Conversely, people don't want to feel like they're constantly being pushed out of town. Relationships, even online, take time to build. sure, Facebook is less than eight years old, but already people speak of it like alexandria, the ancient city, not the southern shore along the District of Columbia.
Stewing over all of this, I started working through a concept I'm framing as "Social Cenergy." My wife hates those kind of marketing tag lines, and in some ways I don't blame her. But, I can't think of any other way to describe it.
The concept is simply this: That society is strongest when energy is place at the core, not at the peripheral. Towns that place all their focus on the suburbs struggle the most with changing times. While towns with a solid center city endure not just generations, but centuries. The same is true for cyber societies.
If we want to truly sustain social media and social networking, the tools of the next big thing need to be built onto the core of the city. To not do this is to constantly be building new ways to transport goods from one place to another using circles, then squares, then triangles, and any other shape we can squeeze into a wheel.
Sure, competing ideas help the whole market place, which ultimately helps our society (when done ethically and responsibly). My father worked for AT&T when the government broke it up for fear that it had become to big. That being said, where is MCI today? Ultimately, AT&T growing pains forced it to redevelop itself in a changing market place. MCI never really had the deep pockets to truly knock down a giant like AT&T. And after the oldest telecommunications company struggled through its growing pains into a digital universe, it made a choice that truly revitalized the company, taking on a new venture by Apple Inc., who decided to get into the cell phone business.
Facebook, in many ways, has become the AT&T of the cyber social universe. In the case of social cenergy, it makes sense that it should be the anchor by which competition fuels new ideas. Therefore, it will be interesting to see how it weathers the changing marketplace that heralds every new thing as the next big thing.
Of course, no city lasts forever. But, now that I'm a father with a five-month-old son, I'd like to think that the cyber world that will truly define his image and reality will be grounded enough so that his own psychological development is equally as grounded. Recent events in Connecticut this past week remind us all of how ungrounded worlds can leave us hanging on a thread of confusion. If we continually seek out new social dwellings online, our own realities will become equally as confusing. we're not just what we eat, but also what our fingers type.
Recent Comments