Social Media. It’s not new and it’s not going to save the world.

I hate the term social media.  It’s a term that has been coined to cover technology and concepts that have updated to cover the new hardware that makes it easier for us to get distracted.

“According to wikipedia, Social media includes web-based and mobile based technologies which are used to turn communication into interactive dialogue among organizations, communities, and individuals. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content.”^[1] Social media is ubiquitously accessible, and enabled by scalable communication techniques.”

You see I’m an old fart, and I’ve been online for eons.  I bult my first computer back in the late 70’s.  Boy it’s amazing what you could do with 2k of RAM.  As money became available I moved up in computing power.  I started sharing online in college, back in those days there weren’t any PC’s and it was a bunch of geeky college kids and professors chatting using a number of different tools.  Some open that could be read by anyone, and some private.  these tools evolved into The Well, AOL, Compuserve, yahoo, ICQ, and a bunch of email front ends that made it “easier” to access.  Nothing is new but the name, and the only thing that has changed is that now we’re so distracted by it.

So what is all the hype about social media really about?

It’s about communication.  It’s about communication in a world were time is a commodity, and there is so much static in the air around us, we can’t sort it out. 

Science fiction has a running thread about information overload.  We’re almost at that stage now.  Instead of saving the world, isn’t it possible that “Social Media” is going to bury the world.

We are using our smartphones, out laptops, our tablets, and out computers to attempt to fill a need.  It’s the need to be a part of something, not feel isolated, and to communicate.

Social Media is nothing more than a tool to accomplish those things.  A useful tool, but a tool non-the-less.  You still have to get your but out of the chair and put skin to skin.