There and Not There: Slippery Social Media
I don’t have a lot to add to Dan Pontefract’s response to George Siemens’ thoughts on “Losing Interest in Social Media”. For the most part, I also think George is right, at least if we are discussing “social media” with a somewhat narrower definition than I usually use the term and if the only significant value being sought is that of the complex thought that comes from deep examination and reflection.
I don’t participate in that kind of social media (which differs significantly from publishing platforms like blogs and wikis) for those things. I look there for the informal glue that binds together (some) communities, for the connections to people that help create (or reinforce) friendships and peer-relationships, and for the sparks that lead me to new and (sometimes) deeper thinking.
Like so many others, I could assert the strength of social media by citing how I found George’s post, which I probably would have discovered anyway, and Dan’s response, which I probably wouldn’t have, but that’s not the issue because George isn’t arguing that social media doesn’t do these things. What George seems to be talking about is a kind of technological determinism, the strength of which I can’t determine (I am a believer in a weak form of de facto tech determinism): that these media are slippery and lead most often to certain behaviors that are characterized by simplicity and relatively shallow thought. They grease the skids toward a certain kind of activity the same way an axe doesn’t force one to chop wood, but it sure lends itself nicely to chopping stuff up and not so well for opening a car door… at least not in the way we probably want to.
And let’s not forget that much of George’s piece is a response to the social media punditocracy, which would have social media as, if not the transformer of loaves into fishes, at least a miraculous cure-all, in which case assessing social media as a pIace of complexity and nuance (of a particular kind) is a sensible reaction. And I thought he was overtly making a bit of sport at their expense…
Themocracy
I see George is leaning back on the foundation- blogging. Writers like Clive Thompson too in “The Art of Public Thinking” http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2011/08/the_art_of_publ.php Heck even you my friend and scott Leslie are “coming back to their blogs”
I’ve been here waiting for y’all, blogging away.
Nice catch with that article. I am going to use it! And given that Clive Thompson seems to “get” social media– not only his ideas about proprioception, but his ideas about using the brevity and concision inherent to a constrained medium like Twitter– I’m glad that he too sees that there is room in the healthy ecosystem for a variety of media…