NiemanJournalismLab reporting:
I am always hesitant to make predictions, but 2012 may just the year
that social media starts to get boring. And this is a good thing.
Bear with me while I explain. Social media is largely still seen as a new, shiny entrant into the world of media.
As
with all new communication technologies, there are those who argue
social media is changing everything, creating a more open and democratic
media space. Others take a diametrically opposed viewpoint. For them,
social media just offers new ways to do old things.
Both are right and wrong at the same time. There is no doubt that
social media technologies do offer new affordances, creating an open,
networked, and distributed media ecosystem at odds with the one-way,
broadcast model of mass media that dominated the 20th century.
At the same time, history shows us how dominant institutions, be they
governments or media conglomerates, appropriate new technologies and
cancel out some of their innovative potential.
The problem is how we frame new technologies. There is always a
degree of hype that greets a new technology; we’ve seen it in talk of
Twitter revolutions and Facebook uprisings.
Initially we are enchanted by the novelty of what these tools and
services enable us to do: upload funny videos, post updates of our
lunch, and share links to worthy articles.
Technologies reach their full potential when we forgot about the
novelty. Instead they become boring and blend into the background. How
often do we think about the technology behind the telephone, or the
television set in our living room?
With any luck, this is what will happen with social media. Social
media tools and services will be so ingrained within our everyday
experiences that we forget that they are such recent developments.
Essentially, the technology will become invisible as we shape it to meet our political, social, and cultural needs.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/12/alfred-hermida-2012-will-be-the-year-social-media-gets-boring/
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