I’m a sort of anachronism in the areas I dabble in online.
While most people in the MMO-IM niche focus on technology triggers to tweak and enhance sales and responsiveness, I tend to view the human elements and work on them instead.
And where I see the focus on technological tools for social media being a focal point of discussion, debate and ‘dollars invested’, I tend to veer instead to the age-old areas of socialization, rooted in our offline world of networking, contacts and relationships.
So when Chris Brogan asked where social media is headed 5 years from now, my instinctive response is to say:
“Why, wherever it has been headed ever since history began!”
Yes, nothing has changed, even though everything changes.
We are still humans with a need, craving and desire to meet and interact with our kind.
We still find it hard to exist in isolation, though we prefer solitude at times.
We still want to reach out and touch lives, albeit with a longer grasp and wider reach than was possible before our connected global economy became more real.
We prefer establishing closer and more meaningful relationships with people we like, resemble and enjoy being around.
We like to choose how much of our lives to share with each group or category of our network.
We dream of being popular, having many friends, taking pole position in the race to be ‘most ______ person on Earth’.
As I see it, technology will adapt to (or be massaged into) allowing such dreams to come true.
I don’t know exactly how or when it will happen. But as long as technology tools are used by people, they will tweak them to their needs – and not merely use them as their creators might have intended.
Long back, I read an article in WIRED magazine about how in essence the tools we currently use for communication and entertainment – radio, TV, telephones, music systems, home theatre and the kind – can be boiled down into a device for transmitting/receiving sound, and one for video/images.
By using software to integrate signals across a set of devices to replay sound, one could be completely mobile – yet enjoy all the benefits that only an array of individual instruments can give us today.
You could be listening to music in your living room, and as you walk out to your car, the music would come with you via a headset or earpiece you’re wearing – and then, automatically shift over to the speakers in your car once you get in.
When you get a phone call, the music automatically fades, as the car speakers become your telephone receiver, transmitting your conversation seamlessly – and then shifting back to being a music player when the call ends.
Technology adapted itself to your desire – to listen to music and answer the phone.
And technology, in the social media arena, will similarly adapt itself to what YOU want it to do for you.
Connect you with friends.
Network you with business contacts.
Keep you in touch with the world around you.
Streamline your essential communications.
Simplify updating your contact database.
And more.
For a short while, as a ‘trend’ or ‘fad’, a specific technology tool will actually change the way we socialize – like Twitter introduces ‘micro blogging’ or Skype created cheap, easy global voice communication hitherto not common.
But will these trends last? Be sustained? Not just because the tools made them possible. Not unless the people using them feel it helps meet a need that’s determined atavistically, not technologically.
That’s just my humble, individual opinion on the future of social media. What’s yours? How do you see this exciting, rapidly morphing arena of the Web evolving? Where do you want it to go?
