Lee Clemmer {dot} com

As I’ve previously maintained, I think the term “social media” is a misnomer because you’re not social when sitting in front of the computer - you’re antisocial.  This is more than just semantics; it points to the fact that maybe it’s not a good thing to spend so much time on the computer, and building a business around using the internet as a “social” platform, a place where people interact, is at best not smart (because people like to be face-to-face), and at worst creates millions of zombies who can only communicate via twitter.

On Friday I listened in on a webinar hosted by FASTForward Blog in which Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport duked it out over Enterprise 2.0, whether it’s even a meaningful term and how successful it is or isn’t.  Pretty interesting stuff and I encourage anyone interested in knowledge management and Enterprise/Web 2.0 stuff to give it a listen.  As a result of this and other discussions I’m really starting to see all the 2.0 stuff not as something completely new, but just old stuff done much better and easier.  Collaboration has been possible for a long time, it’s just that today it’s much more usable.  AJAX had been around since before the term was coined.  So any talk gushing about a new era of “socialness” is missing the fact that we’re just witnessing a different stage in an evolution, not something “never-before-seen.”

Which brings me to the point of the post.  Instead of “social media,” we should more aptly say “advanced asynchronous communication channels,” asynchronous being they key word here.  Writing online is like graffiti on walls: someone may read it, maybe not.  Is it social? No. Unless you want to water down the word to the point of meaninglessness.

Thought of the day: as much as people are hootin’ and hollering about the “social” internet with its “communities” and “groups” and “collaboration,” I think one might make the argument that whenever you’re sitting in front of a screen and hacking away at the keyboard, you are most definitely not being social. What does the word really mean anyway? From Merriam-Webster’s dictionary:

Main Entry: so·cial
Pronunciation: ’sO-sh&l
Function: adjective
1 a : tending to form cooperative and interdependent relationships with others of one’s kind b : living and breeding in more or less organized communities <social insects>
2 : of or relating to human society, the interaction of the individual and the group, or the welfare of human beings as members of society <immature social behavior> —so·cial·ly /-E/ adverb

Clearly it doesn’t state here that being social is a face-to-face kind of thing, but “living and breeding” kind of implies that. Also, when it comes to “interaction of the individual and the group,” you’re not really interacting with anyone other than yourself when sitting at a computer; in other words, you’re socializing only with the computer. Yes, the computer is a tool to transmit communication from one person to another (if you read this), but at this very moment that I am pressing the keys down to type this word, I am only communicating with myself, since no one else is reading this right now other than me. So, am I being social right at this moment? No, in fact, right now I am being anti-social for being pasted to the screen.

In a sense we are degrading human communication with all the technology at our disposal. The more time we spend communicating with any of our various tools, the less time we actually spend interacting with the humans immediately in our environment. Ultimately our personal relationships have to suffer. I would say that whenever people talk of the internet as “social,” it should come with a big fat asterisk; dorking out at your laptop is not being very social, asynchronously communicating or not. For nerds and geeks (like myself), it might be comfortable to communicate behind the wall of the computer screen, but real, valuable, juicy interaction happens face-to-face.

Is the internet really fulfilling its promise to bring everyone together in one gigantic Martian mind-meld, or is it really alienating us further and further from each other, making us less social and disrupting real, live communities?

Update: This Google fellow seems to have similar views.

Update 2: Relevant article published by the American Psychological Association almost 10 years ago: “Isolation increases with Internet use.”

Update 3: Could social media be addictive?  Here’s a fellow who thinks it’s time for social rehab.

The answer is probably yes, but I haven’t had one in a while, at least they’re original until I find out about someone else who’s already doing it.  Browsing for music videos or streaming songs… I haven’t seen it until now: Dizzler.