In a recent tweet Steve Rubel noted: could we stop calling stuff “social media”? It’s all media, he says, there’s no more boxes.
Okay, I was one of many to reply instantly: but what about TV, and papers and radio even? They’re old media, they’re not social!
I may have been wrong.
When I studied media and journalism in the early 1990s, we had no “social media”. If someone would have used the phrase, it would have been in a socio-political context. The question would’ve been: how do the media enhance or obstruct social and political change? It was all very much a theoretical practice, bathed in the ghosts of Adorno and Marcuse.
And Marx even.
Remember, back then, the Berlin Wall had just fallen and the world was seeing another revolution than that of “social media”. The changes back then were felt by everyone, not just the technorati — even if we only got the news through our CRT TVs and landlocked phone lines.
I often wonder how my teenage years (admittedly, spent amongst computers and D&D but not to today’s extent, obviously) would have formed me if there’d been an internet the way we’re seeing it today. Or how my life would have turned out if there had.
But this isn’t a memory lane post.
What I’m wondering is, would the Berlin Wall have fallen sooner, or later, or not at all if we’d been as collectively hooked-up as we are today?
The world is no different from that time in at least one way: Korea, Tibet, Burma — there’s no need to spell it all out. And, as with the Burma protests, we’ve seen that this social media of ours have had little effect.
True, we have awareness. But we had that when I was a teen too. And people in the German Democratic Republic had it as well. And I don’t know how they did it, how they created that mass movement, all these social networks of sympathizers, but it worked. Just as well.
So, does only online media count as social? Or has all media become social? If you count RSS and Share This buttons, it’s getting there, but it’s not ubiquitous yet. Far from it, when I see how I struggle in my job to convince people of jumping the Web 2.0 bandwagon.
But if you ask: do all media give us an opportunity to learn and share and shape our lives, then yes: it’s all media, it’s all social and there’s no boxes.
Life’s what you make it, said Talk Talk. Guess they were right.
Tags: berlin wall, social media, web 2.0
