Social Media

Better late than never...

I believe that Gladwell is somewhat correct in his assertion that the social media revolution is not a true revolution, like the civil rights movement, but a small change in how people organize and communicate.  I believe this is right for the time being because we do not yet champion the power of it.  Facebook and Twitter are still adapting, trying new things and innovating.  We are seeing more of a prevalence in location based meta data being associated with the things you post.  People are now able to get their Facebook and Tweets on their smart phones which are becoming common among our population.  Other websites, especially news sites, are using social media as their login and connecting the comments you make on one website available for all your friends to take notice of.  News is crossing into being spread via social networking instead of a person going out to find it.  These are all great advances, but it is all very new.  We have not hit the climax of social media and as we go further, it will become more important.  It was only a month ago that my father got signed up for Facebook.  Facebook is a little like an infection for people too, because now he goes to new websites his friends have posted about, reconnects with old friends, has been to my blog, and enjoys more facets of the Internet where he used to just be constrained to email.  As more people get connected, they will be more immersed in social media and we will start to see it become more important in everyone's daily lives.  How many people do you now know that tweet every small thing they do? How many did you know a year ago? It's probably doubled.  There is an adoption period with every new technology and social media can't be expected to conquer everything in just 5 or so years.  How long did it take for people to adopt cell phones? Television? Email? Instant Messenger?  How long did it take for the respective markets to get it right (or are they still changing?) and how much did they have to change to get there?  Social media is still an infant technology and as we go forward, we can expect bigger and better things from our society becoming more connected to each other.  I would hope that in 10 years, Gladwell will need to update his opinion and agree that this is a big change in our world; giving the weak and powerless an ability to be heard.