Scoble Asks What Is Social Media?

Robert Scoble responds to a question by Dare Obasanjo, who apparently just heard the term “social media” the other day. Others, like Frank Shaw at Waggener Edstrom, are apparently uneasy with the term, too.

Just to set context: I find 14,571 blog posts have been tagged “social media”, starting back years ago, and its being tagged around 100 times a day. Who knows how many posts use the term and don’t tag it.

Robert gamely tries to define social media by examples, and then closes weakly:

[from What is social media?.

[…]

When I say “social media” or “new media” I’m talking about Internet media that has the ability to interact with it in some way. IE, not a press release like over on PR Newswire, but something like what we did over on Channel 9 where you could say “Microsoft sucks” right underneath one of my videos.

I don’t really care what you call this “new media” but you’ve got to admit that something different is happening here than happens on other media above.

The fundamental distinctions between social media and the things that preceded are these:

1. Social Media Is Not A Broadcast Medium: unlike traditional publishing — either online or off — social media are not organized around a one-to-many communications model.
2. Social Media Is Many-To-Many: All social media experiments worthy of the name are conversational, and involve an open-ended discussion between author(s) and other participants, who may range from very active to relatively passive in their involvement. However, the sense of a discussion among a group of interested participants is quite distinct from the broadcast feel of the New York Times, CNN, or a corporate website circa 1995. Likewise, the cross linking that happens in the blogosphere is quite unlike what happens in conventional media.
3. Social Media Is Open: The barriers to becoming a web publisher are amazingly low, and therefore anyone can become a publisher. And if you have something worth listening to, you can attract a large community of likeminded people who will join in the conversation you are having. [Although it is just as interesting in principle to converse with a small group of likeminded people. Social media doesn’t need to scale up to large communities to be viable or productive. The long tail is at work here.]
4. Social Media Is Disruptive: The-people-formerly-known-as-the-audience (thank you, Jay Rosen!) are rapidly migrating away from the old-school mainstream media, away from the centrally controlled and managed model of broadcast media. They are crafting new connections between themselves, out at the edge, and are increasingly ignoring the metered and manipulated messages that centroid organizations — large media companies, multi national organizations, national governments — are pushing at them. We, the edglings, are having a conversation amongst ourselves, now; and if CNN, CEOs, or the presidential candidates want to participate they will have to put down the megaphone and sit down at the cracker barrel to have a chat. Now that millions are gathering their principal intelligence about the world and their place in it from the web, everything is going to change. And for the better.

Aside from my diatribe about Social Media, in capitals, I also want to make a distinction with social media, in lower case. In the latter form, I am speaking of the tools that are used — blogs, wikis, whatever — to create Social Media. It is blogging that has become the most formidible platform for Social Media, and much of my ranting and hopes is directed toward the future of blogging as a force for change in the world.

The societal phenomenon of Social Media (supported by the nuts and bolts of social media tools) has been a profound one, over the past decade. I predict that the impact in the next decade will be even more sweeping, and much more widespread. As an additional billion or two of the world’s population finds its way onto the web, our only hope may be that the web finds its way into the world: that the principles of openness, transparency, diversity, and egalitarianism that engender web culture remake the world, one conversation at a time. Political parties, multinationals, the corner dress shop, your county government — everything will be influenced by the infectious openness of the web, because the edglings will simply not settle for less.

That’s another way of defining Social Media: it is the way that we are organizing ourselves to communicate, to learn, and to understand the world and our place in it. And we just won’t accept any models for that that aren’t intensely social: we won’t put up with large organizations telling us what is right, or true, or necessary. We will now have those conversations among ourselves, here, at the edge. Social Media has released us, freed us: and we won’t go back.

So, a formula: Social Media = what the edglings use to communicate.

A Well-Ordered Humanism And The Future Of Everything

I have been throwing the term “Edgling” around a lot recently, as has been noted by various folks. I think that Jay Rosen’s term, The People Formerly Known As The Audience (TPFKATA) is unwieldy, and subject to all sorts of theatrical metaphorical clashes, as Doc Searls noted:

I don’t deny that I am sometimes on stage and sometimes an audience member (the latter more often than the former). But I’m uncomfortable with the theater metaphor (Shakespeare withstanding), at least in respect to blogging. I think bloggers have readers, not audiences. And I think the distinction is important, if not essential.

It’s different with podcasting, or any other kind of ‘casting. There, often (though not always) we are performing. The theater metaphor is more appropriate. Yet even here we run the risk of perceived hierarchy, since the audience is subordinate to the performer. (Podcasting, blogging) is Theater is an example of what cognitive linguists call a conceptual metaphor, or a frame. It’s something we think and talk in terms of. Meaning, we borrow a concept (a frame) and and its vocabulary to understand and talk about a subject. There are entailments to the theater metaphor. One is the old top-down media that really were comprised of performers and audiences. Because peer practices like blogging and podcasting don’t require the same asymmetries, why continue to use an asymmetrical frame when symmetrical one will do?

Also, what works best with blogging and podcasting is just being ourselves. Without artifice. Without performance. Without contrivance. No less talented, but far more relaxed, than what being “on stage” traditionally, reflexively, requires.

Personally, I favor the term Edgling because I want to move away from media metaphors, and use economic or sociological ones. This is not about who is “producing content” and who is “consuming” it: which is the basic paradigm of media thinking. Instead, it is about control moving from the central, large, mass-market organizations — which includes media companies, but also other large organizations, like government, religious organizations, and so on — out to the individuals — we, the people — at the edge.

As power moves from the center to the edge the “Centroids” — those that hold with the centralized power of an industrial era — will scream about all the negatives that they perceive in the out-of-control future that threatens the basis of their world view. But the Edglings will find it liberating to get out of the stranglehold on information, communication, and the marketplace that centralized organizations attempt to impose.

Just as importantly, I think that Edglings share a common base of perceptions about the world and our place in it that transcend the media market, and form what I think of as the basis for a future metaphysics, or, at the least, a new worldview. I have written about the central propositions of web culture before (see Rebooting, and The Rise of Web Culture and Its Enemies, for example), and I believe that the rise of web culture is perhaps the greatest hope that humanity has for a better, or at least survivable, future.

Here’s some thoughts on the emerging characteristics of web culture: the glue that holds Edglings — and through them, everything else — together:

These facets of society are arrayed in no particular order, and are strongly mutually reinforcing. They share, at the core, a strong predisposition to reject centralized authority, whether in business, government, media, or religion. The web allows us to change all the major axes of life, and to work our way onto a substantively different cultural ethos than what has preceded it, specifically the structures of life and work that have been thrown up by the industrial revolution and its aftermath.

I cannot overstate that everything is being changed by this new communication matrix. It will change our perceptions and sense of self, how we identify with others and how that affiliation takes place, what we think of as important, and what we believe needs to be done to make the world a better place to live and work.

I am no bomb-throwing revolutionary, but I do feel that much of what is wrong in the world is the outcome of outmoded forms of social interaction, and that much of that will need to be put aside. New forms of social engagement and cultural involvement will arise, and inexorably rewire the world and our minds. And those who have much to lose will struggle long and hard to stop or slow this change. [As just one example, the current trend in the US Executive branch toward consolidation of power and the unbalancing of our three-part systems of checks and balances is an almost subconscious struggle against the dissolution of the center and the coming rise of the edge.]

In media, there is no going back from what the Blogosphere has done. The Web has shaken US politics up, but it has not led to a transformation in our political systems. But that is likely to change, as more and more people grow disenchanted with a system that demands so much and is capable of doing so little. And in our personal lives, we seek a greater degree of autonomy and satisfaction in the workplace and our pursuit of happiness, where art is becoming intermixed with punching the clock.

More people are becoming more aware of a greater world, a larger world, and are starting to consider themselves as world citizens, rather than simply as inhabitants of nation states that arose through millennia of wars of conquest and domination. People are reconnecting with a local sense of place: their neighborhood, their specific locale. This glocalization of world view will shift power — slowly — away from nationalism. Consider the example of Catalonia, or the growing differences between blue and red states.

These trends will lead to a basic identification of ourselves as humans living together on Spaceship Earth, as Buckminster Fuller called it, and a rejection of ideologies that divide us based on language, religion, caste, gender, or ethnic background. As anthropologist and ethnographer Claude Levi-Strauss said, in a 1972 interview,

A well-ordered humanism does not begin with itself, but puts things back in their place. It puts the world before life, life before man, and the respect of others before love of self.

This is the lesson that the people we call “savages” teach us: a lesson of modesty, decency and discretion in the face of a world that preceded our species and that will survive it.

We need to put things back into place, although the configuration that web culture will make of all this is brand new. Much of the sensibility of our time will seem like a return to things that were put aside at the start of the industrial revolution, although much will be completely new. But at the core, Levi-Strauss’ checklist — world, life, people, the respect of others, self — seems like a pretty good starting point.