Fred Wilson's Vision For Social Media

Fred Wilson offers a concise notion, leaving aside the specifics, about where this social media thing is headed:

[from A VC: My Vision For Social Media]

I believe that we are headed to a world which everyone will share their lives with the rest of the world via the Internet. That is social media. It's a huge movement and we are at the start of it.

There is no dout that at least some of the world is doing that with the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 tools we have today. Many suggest that there are barriers to this vision being realized:

• Techcrunch's Michael Arrington advances the conventional wisdom that some people don't want to share their lives with others on the Web. I think Fred is suggesting a bit more of a watershed, where many more people will be conversant with Web technology, and social media will be as common as automatic transmissions, ATMs, and cell phones, all of which were once a new and radical technology. Arrington makes the reasonable point that mobile will play a big role in the future of social media, but that's sort of a footnote to Fred's central insight.
• Alexander van Elsas argues that the value of social media is not the messages, but the interaction, or, as McLuhan might have styled it, the medium. When the medium is social, the deep message is sociality. It's not what we are saying, its how we are shaping ourselves, as a web culture, through the implicit socialization of the medium.
• Nick O'Neill seems to go off the tracks when he focuses on the billions that don't have access to computers today. As the world moves toward increasing urbanization and globalization, more people come online everyday. Extrapolate the curve, and within a few decades, at the most, the vast majority of people will have access to the web.

And the core issue, again, is the enigmatic 'content'.

Do you consider your email as web content? Your phone calls? Your wisecracks to a friend at work about a TV show last night? In a world when everything could be made social, increasingly the younger folks will adopt a social angle on it all.

Social TV is imminent.

Some telephone startup will (re)discover social calls, or a means to published the audio of calls in real-time, a la Seesmic and Qik.

Solutions like Twitter suggest a time beyond private email, where increasingly people are communicating openly in a social context about what would have formerly been done via private email.

You can argue about adoption of these tools by older people, but you need to look at the young to see what 2010 will look like. Teenagers aren't reading Groundswell; they are simply living online to the degree that they have access.

Comments

[Chris Saad]

Stowe I think it's time we started thinking beyond social media towards personal media. I've posted my thoughts about it here: http://chrissaad.wordpress.com/2008/06/01/my-vision-for-social-media-personal-reality/

[Jeff McNeill]

Great post. It does seem that though the medium is the message, there is something of a bias *for* social media vs. traditional (unsocial) media. Sociality of the species showing through?

P.S., not clear on the Groundswell reference. Do you mean that the young people aren't reading/strategizing about social media as an instrument but simply being social online/with media? I am interested in the seeming lack of (need for) reflectiveness in the practices of younger generations online. McLuhan of course points the way here, as usual.

Cheers, Jeff

[Stowe Boyd]

Jeff - Yes, I agree: we are socially wired, and given the chance (now that control of the media has slipped from the center to the edglings) we will make it social.

Groundswell - Charlene Li's book. Yes, I meant that kids are reading about social media, they are making it.