Predicting Social Media Trends: The past is not the future
Thanks to Michael Wesch for this video and letting us share it over the web.
While I enjoyed very much the classes taught at the Blogging 4 Business Conference in Salt Lake City Utah yesterday, it was the afternoon Keynote address by Gary Goldhammer VP of Edelman that really hit home for me.
Let me backtrack a bit and set the situation up for you from my point of view. I went to the Podcast and New Media Expo (2007) in Ontario, California and while I met tons of people I had been networking with online, I have to be brutally honest and say that I left the conference feeling like the sessions were lacking what I had wanted to learn. Don’t get me wrong, the speakers were all very amazing people who are doing great things, but each class felt like it was a “here is what I did, now go see if it works for you” type of pep speech. New media is still too new for anyone to be an “expert” on anything but I wanted to hear the words “this is what you need to be doing-this is where things are going and this is how to get there.”
I was struggling with these thoughts-not trying to say I am any better than those who presented at the conference either-they have implemented what they have learned and I am just beginning, but there was something missing.
Then I had a conversation when I returned, with a friend who said the Internet was still too immature for him. He said that as a whole it is still being used for entertainment. He is friends with me on Twitter and some other communities and he says that when he logs on, he has yet to find anything anyone is saying really helpful to him. He wants information, not just what you’re doing that afternoon, he wants to be educated not entertained-he doesn’t have time for that.
I had a long argument with him and hung up very frustrated with what he was saying.
Then at the conference yesterday-it all collided together with Gary’s address. He said a lot of important things and here are the few that really meant something to me:
(These quotes are very close to what he said-I couldn’t type fast enough to write down word for word)
“We respect what has happened, ignoring what could have happened, but the could have happened is where greater innovation might be.”
“What we know is less significant than what we don’t know.”
We are all amazed at what has happened with technology, but what don’t we know about the technology that we have, or don’t have? This kind of boggles the mind. Even ten years ago were people thinking about text messaging on their cell phones as a mainstream practice? If they were, then what is it that they weren’t thinking about? We are preoccupied with getting video on our cell phones, is there a greater technology that we aren’t thinking about instead?
And can we look at the past to determine the future or even predict the future of social media? We can’t, according to Gary. He gave this story that will stick with me forever:
“There was a turkey farm where lived a specific turkey (he hasn’t named the turkey yet, but I’ll call the turkey Fred).
So Fred the turkey wakes up every morning to the farmer coming out to feed him and patting Fred on the head. Fred enjoys this very much and looks forward to this routine each and every morning.
Like clockwork the farmer always gets up and feeds Fred the turkey and pats Fred on the head. This happens every day rain or shine at the same time for 1000 days.
On day1001 like clockwork the farmer gets up and goes out to feed the turkey named Fred. The turkey eats the food the farmer gives him and then the farmer cuts Fred’s head off and they eat Fred for Thanksgiving. How much of this could Fred have predicted?”
Don’t use the past to predict the future, make the future of how you use the Internet the way you want it to be.
I was so stuck on the fact that no one at the PME told me what they are doing or will be doing, just what they have done-that I lost the idea that it doesn’t matter what others are doing, I need to worry about myself. Thinking about my post “The Internet is Crashing: Permanently”, what am I personally doing to make sure I am flexible if either something horrible goes wrong, or if something wonderfully awesome happens-am I prepared to own it and make it work for me either way?
What about my friend? Well from our conversation, I see that he will probably wait to see what happens and then try to adapt. What I don’t see happening ever, though, is the Internet, or Twitter or any application turning into an education only outlet. Look at the TV and Print and Radio mediums. If I turn on Nickelodeon or MTV then I will get entertainment. If I turn on The History Channel or The Discovery Channel, then I will be informed. If my friend wanted these applications to work for him, he needs to turn on the right channels. He would join up with programmers and developers and talk with them throughout the day rather than myself-who not only doesn’t know code, but has done some damage trying to figure it out!
So through this mumble jumble I understand now that I can’t rely on anyone to predict what is going to happen to the future of social media because the past isn’t the future-I have to get in the drivers seat and make my own future. Anyone who wants to join me, I won’t get upset if you go down a different road than I go-just make sure we keep in touch, my screen name on Twitter is mediajoltz!
Posted in New Media, conversations, relationships, social networking, twitter, Blogging 4 Business, social media trends |3 Comments so far
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It’s hard to see the changes happening as you drive down the road and the scenery is changing literally by the second. And even if we’re on the road together we don’t have the same perception since we’ve come from different directions and see different parts of the view.
My way of coping with this kind of cognitive dissonance has evolved into a strategy of learning what I can about what’s available, relying a lot on my instincts, delving more into the parts that interest me, and relying on others who are interested in different pieces of the puzzle to help me bring it all together.
I’ll be sixty years old in February, which is something I didn’t reveal until recently when I decided that there’s something to be said for getting to this point. If I’ve adapted to everything from color tv to 8 track tapes to computers to video on my cell phone I figure I can adapt to whatever’s next - and maybe even have some advice for someone else about doing the same.
(but you’ll have to come over and program my digital tv thingamabob because although tivo is a dream this new HD setup we’ve got is a nightmare :))
I should note here that your “friend” (me) did say some other things about the technologies that are being utilized. The biggest thing that I notice is that nothing, currently, that people are using in the new social media outlets are “new” ideas. Which is where the immature view of the social media outlets was given. It’s not that I want education or information all the time … it’s that I want something more than just the typical “same” of the internet.
The ideas that we can tap into different technologies with greater speed is something that couldn’t have been predicted, but to utilize Databases, HTML, Scripting, Codecs, etc with greater synergy is something that was thought of back in the late 80’s.
I remember the days of BBS’s and UUENCODE-ing pictures and binary files. That’s getting old school. Today to be able to transfer the same information (via Flicker, Facebook, etc) is impressive, but once again … something that has been done for a while, just not with the same rapidity.
No I’m looking for something to mature the technology. It still seems gimmicky. And it’s not that I don’t understand about outlets and venues for specific needs. It’s just that the “neatness” of these ideas that are new to most people are things that I’ve been doing for years. Quite possibly the maturity of the technology may come with incorporating more standards across the board to use the technology. Just think about what happened with USB, FireWire and eSATA once the standards were in place. Now we have people who can create something and be 95% sure it works with very little issues. Look at Flash and what is done, because people work on a standard.
And possibly it is because I know the inner-workings of the technolgies that makes my view on these points rather jostled. I think it’s great where we are, but it’s such a small step as to where we could be. That’s the thing that is interesting to me.
Oh and P.S.
My complaint is the same as your complaint … no one is showing what will be happening or what they will be doing. The things we are seeing technology wise are things that are just “what we have done in the past.” And predicting the future is simple … just think about where you want to take the next step. I always look at Video Games as a great place .. nothing pushes tecnology like video games. To interact with a person remotely and actually manipulate code on their machine (console, whatever) is something that is really cool to look at.
I still believe that the “Future” of anything static is to make it interactive. The internet hasn’t found that issue yet … yet. We still leave posts, use chat tools, etc which is all static, but with the greater power of VOIP (thank you skype) and other realtime interaction then the social media outlets will slowly start to move in that arena. However, personally, I don’t believe we can ever truly get there until we finally get rid of TCP/IP, but that’s for another thread and conversation.