This has been an interesting week for Social Networking and SMO, with varying examples of social media sites popping up into (somewhat more) traditional media.
Law and Order – Last Sunday’s episode, a re-run originally airing in 2006, centered around the slighly sinister social networking site, BeFriends.com, an obvious and thinly-veiled reference to a pre-Rupert Murdoch MySpace.
Slate.com – On Friday, everyone’s favorite online news magazine (alright, *my* favorite online news magazine) published, in its technology section, an interesting column entitled “In Your Face; How Facebook could crush MySpace, Yahoo!, and Google.”
NYT.com –Ok, you caught me. Technically, this article was written about devil-spawn Jason Calcanis’s Mahalo search engine, and not specifically about social media. Still, I chose to include it because it helps me prove my point.
These three reference share a common thread; they paint an altogether unflattering picture of social media. BeFriends.com, L&O’s nom de plume for MySpace, isn’t just a website, it’s also a crime scene (the episode opens with images of the murder victim du jour appearing on the site) as well as (SPOILER) the marketplace where the murder itself was bartered in exchange for sex from the victim’s teenage daughter.
But wait, there’s more. The site’s still cast in an incredibly unfavorable light, even when you forget about, you know, the murder. Most notably, MySpace, I mean BeFriends, is caricatured as a seedy online hangout, spawned by a slightly-menacing computer geek, where bored upper-middle-class teenagers while away their moments hitting on the opposite sex and being stalked by digital predators suffering from all manner of mental illness.
Things don’t improve much for social networking when one reads the Slate article. Don’t let the title fool you, read the article and you’ll see that the title is betrayed and the article devolves into a mini-rant on how Facebook’s decision to make the Facebook Platform available to any programmer. Most interesting is that, despite the usual platitude, the site largely slams social media in general, and MySpace in particular as a’spam infested state of nature’.
My favorite part of the article is where the author describes Facebook as the ‘volvo of social networking’ leaving readers to continue the metaphor by likening MySpace to Bufalo Bill’s creepy white van in Silence of the Lambs.
That leaves us with the NYT article. Whats interesting about this article is not what it says, but rather, what it doesn’t say. For twenty-three paragraphs this article discusses human powered search, focusing on devil-spawn Jason Calcanis’s About.com/DMOZ clone Mahalo and not one mention of Digg, del.ico.us, StumbleUpon, or Reddit. The biggest social networking reference in the whole article is a single mention of Squidoo.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Seth Godin as much as the next guy, but Squi-freaking-doo? Are you joking? This is 2007 right? Did I somehow turn into Scott Bakula from Quantum Leap?
Taken by themselves, these three instances would likely barely register a blip on anyone’s radar, and obviously, they were, to some degree, cherry-picked to prove a point. However, as a group, they sugest some conclusions that many social media fans may find distasteful:
- Social media is still very much in its infancy.
- For many people, including the public at large, MySpace specifically, and social networking in general, still struggles with the perception that it is little more than a haven for bored teenagers, sexual predators, and hard-core computer geeks.
- MySpace in particular will struggle with this perception, and this problem of perception may represent the single greatest obstacle to the site’s long-term success.
- Despite the fact that all social media, at its core, is user generated, many people still don’t understand the human element of social media.
Of course, many might disagree with these conclusions, and rightfully so. Still, it is getting harder and harder to argue that social media isn’t suffering with some potentially severe perception issues. Of course, only time will tell whether or not these perception issues turn into a chronic problem for the medium as a whole.
First of all, the pop culture ref’s were awesome! Quantum Leap, Buffalo Bill and Law & Order all in the same post. This will probably cause a google data center to burst into flames.
Secondly, great post. Social Networking online is really a nascent technology. Sure, we’ve been social networking for years but now we’ve taken the water cooler gossip, laundromat pontifications, and PTA punditing and rolled them into one instant gratification package that everyone can comment on. Social networking offline was small and compartmentalized. Yeah, we told secrets and related stories but the story got changed at each point like that gossip game you play where you whisper a secret to the next person in line and the secret is completely different by the time the last person tells it.
Now that natural, organic dissolution of a social interaction is permalinked, archived and DUGG for all eternity – for all to see. This presents a problem because callous insults or tawdry conversation that was made in the heat of anger or after too many glasses of merlot that was usually forgotten or fogiven shortly thereafter now lives forever on the web in these communities.
Which means a person’s online “profile” is built, not on who they are, but on what they’ve said or who they’ve interacted with. This is why it appeals to pervs so much. What better for a voyeur than a MySpace profile than can be read and reread 24/7 with complete anonymity?
Don’t get me wrong. I love social networking and I think we’ll get it down just like we got the watercooler gossip down…it’ll just take a little time and growing pains.