I set down my social media pom pons while reading this piece by Mark McKinnon. It’s about the loss of meaningful social connections. This could be an interesting asterisk in the handbook for using social media for workplace learning. I have had many meaningful conversations while blogging, microblogging, etc. but this resonated with me. Perhaps it’s because I work alone from home. But that’s probably where work is going (more distributed workers). How do we help make sure conversations are not brief utterances and exchanges of URLs? (JC)
Twitter Jumped the Shark This Week | The Daily Beast | Mark McKinnon | 27 February 2009
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I suppose the title’s ironic, but to say “Twitter jumped the shark this week” is to imply that (a) it did and (b) that McKinnon recognized it.
In Here Comes Everybody, Craig Shirky talks about a difference between broadcast media (which you and I grew up with) and social media. If you’re over 35 or so, your expectation is that messages in public are directed (at least in part) to you.
With social media, though, Shirky says of all those idiotic messages: they’re not talking to you.
For me, Facebook has stagnated, probably because at least 75% of my Facebook contacts are on Twitter. I have 111 followers on Twitter, though I have no idea why. A few apparently hope I’ll hire them or buy stuff from them (speramus meliora).
I take conversations out of Twitter into other venues because I really dislike cramming conversations into 140-character bites. It’s as if we work in the same building but only talk as we ride the elevator one floor.
And, honestly, when people yap about “I need X followers to get to Y,” my urge is to drop them or block them.
Dave Fergusons last blog post..Two-day wonder
I see social media in terms of the concepts of “weak ties” and “strong ties”. Both are needed, but in the social networks that we grew up in (as people older than 40), in general, we had a dozen or so strong ties (close friends and close relatives), and perhaps a few weak ties. Those people who have huge numbers of weak ties are “connectors”, and knowledge is/was distributed throughout the world through weak ties, especially those of connectors.
I think that many of the new social media tools have proliferated “weak ties” from a few to hundreds or thousands. But, as Malcolm Gladwell noted in Blink, we tend to starting forgetting people’s names at about 150 people, and so thousands of weak ties are not personal connections anymore, but a broadcast audience. The illusion of blogging, Facebook, and Twitter is that we are having “conversations” with others. Most of the time we are not. We each have our own cable TV station, and are hoping that someone is watching and listening.