/Big Mouth/ Imitation of life
05/05/2009 | Filed under Discover > Big Mouth
They’re on the bleeding edge, baby – but are the early adopters and online evangelists missing out on the bigger picture?
My friends have been online for a long time and over the years, the way we communicate has changed. Our conversations have moved from forums to messageboards, from messageboards to email, from email to instant messaging, from instant messaging to social network status updates. Our phone calls became texts and our texts became tweets. We’re still friends, though. We still know what’s going on in each other’s lives. In fact, we know more about each other than ever. Don’t we?
I’m not so sure. I recently discovered that a friend was ill – hospital ill. “More tests”, said the status update. What tests? He’d been in and out of clinics for months and his status updates said so, but the news was lost in the trivia – buried in an avalanche of inanity.
I’m not suggesting that social networks are bad. But again and again I’m finding I seem to be living in a different world to the tech triumphalists and their sunny Californian positivity. I’m told social networks are bringing us closer together, but my experience has been the opposite. I read excited articles about the wisdom of crowds and ‘social news’, and then I read the comments on the Daily Mail website. I learn about the self-correcting nature of the blogosphere, but I see inaccurate stories parroted and embellished, the posters’ mayfly minds moving on to other annoyances long before the fact-checking few press their ‘it’s bollocks!’ buzzers. I’m told I should be excited about increasing audience participation, but I’m sitting in a BBC studio watching the texts and emails come in and believe me, it ain’t pretty.
More than anything, I’m tired of the sheer self-absorption of the electronic elite. This month they’re all Twittering, so when something interesting happens they hear about it on Twitter, because of course that’s where they are. Within minutes, Twitter is the future of news! A few months back, they were all social networking, so when something interesting happened they heard about it on a social network. Social networking is the future of news! Before that it was blogs. Future of news! If this time next month the technorati are drinking Special Brew with tramps and they see something interesting on a cardboard box, drinking Special Brew with tramps will be – yes – the future of news!
They’re not completely wrong, but they’re not completely honest either, because they all have a product to sell and that product is themselves. Reality is the enemy of marketing; if it wasn’t, ads for Lynx aftershave would show pimply teenagers with bad taste in music touching themselves and weeping. It’s the same with tech trends: “New Thing Mildly Useful, Not Too Annoying, Quite Like That Other Thing” won’t boost your blog traffic, secure you a book deal or get you on stage at conferences. “Vagrants 2.0: The Wisdom Of Tramps” will. It’s not reality. It’s Reality 2.0!
Gary was writing for .net in the Stone Age. He’s a journo and software expert. www.bigmouthstrikesagain.com
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Comments
Neil Bant / 04/06/2009 / 14:45 / http://www.targ8.com
Missing out on the bigger picture. Sure....
Google minus youtube traffic has 64% share of the web search market, taking 3% YoY from Yahoo, msn LIVE / BING and AOL. Ask.com declined its share but made up for it via mywebsearch.com.
Targ8.com also grew massively in the last year aggregating lots of searchable sites and engines into one search box. The trend is this growth in search portals rather than search engines that interests me. mywebsearch.com is almost bigger than sister brand ask.com having 2% share and continues to gain market share. Targ8.com provides more than mywebsearch, which only searches Google, Yahoo and Ask, as Targ8 targets lots of searchable sites like social networks too.
Lee / 13/10/2009 / 15:38 / http://www.soak.co.uk
As technology has evolved the amount of tangible communication has decreased, simply because it is quicker, rarely better, just quicker
