Are We Social-Networking Ourselves To Poverty?

So James Franco has declared that 'Social Media Is Over' and done the unthinkable...he has shut down his Twitter account.

Will the world stop spinning? Is this the end of western civilization? What next, will people stop asking questions on Quora, will they cease to publish photos on Facebook, will we see the end of Skype-messaging? Worst of all, might the long-awaited Godot known as "Enterprise 2.0" now never turn up?

Well I have news for us all: Franco may be righter than he knows.

It is not that Social Media Is Dead, however. It is that "Social Media" itself is too fanciful a term, right up there with "Social Shopping."

Personally I am not convinced that Twitter is primarily a social medium, I see it more as a collaboration tool that has been momentarily sidelined and become stereotyped in its usage despite its infinite applicability.

But then that is the curse of "Social" - the word has a track record of bogging down all that it engulfs.

One example. I am so ancient that when I first studied "Social" and Political Science at Cambridge, there wasn't even a Social Science faculty, my degree course was affiliated to the Committee of Social & Political Science. Adding the word "Social" to science, back in the day, was akin to adding the word "Fair" to trade. People smelled a rat!

Now it gets added to anything and everything, so that we have the Social Graph, we have Social Data, and we even have Social Authority. But the mother and father of all the "Social" colloquies remains "Social Media."

Let's see whether James Franco's move this week triggers a debate as to whether we are not about to see a correction in the international marketplace of ideas, a retrenchment from the strangely misguided notion that the hand the writes the most Tweets rules the world.

No wonder China is out-pacing the U.S. on so many metrics of productivity and economic progress: according to Nielsen, social networking now accounts for 22% of all time spent online in the U.S.

Why Blogging is Not a True Co-Technology

Speaking today in Tokyo at The New Context Conference 2010, the founder of Twitter, Biz Stone (pictured), put onto the record two sentences that will stand the test of time in the era of social computing:

"Twitter isn't a triumph of technology it's a triumph of humanity. A more connected world leads to a more empathic world."

Interestingly, Stone makes this observation in the self-same week that saw the sale of TechCrunch, Inc. to New York-based AOL - triggering a spate of commentaries along the lines of This Is the Death of Independent Blogging.

Is this an inflexion point? Hell, yes. And a big one. This week is also the week in which, as Guy Kawasaki reminds us, that Twitter's traffic overtook that of MySpace.

So what is going on? Why is independent blogging being characterized as dying at the very moment that tweeting is becoming as natural a part of the interconnected world as breathing?

The key, I believe, is in that word "ïnterconnected" - because blogging, for all its merits, has always suffered from that one huge shortcoming, namely that (notwithstanding the excellent innovations like RSS, Trackbacks, the Technorati real-time APIs and even Google's Blog Search) it truly isn't very interactive. I blog, you blog, he/she/it blogs. We hyperlink to each other, but that is about it. Blog feedback threads are frustratingly isolated silos. In fact, to be blunt, blogging is about as innovative a use of the Web as propping open your office door with a Xitami web server.

Tweeting, in contrast, is quite another pair of shoes. Twitter is a true co-technology. And only co-technologies will truly flourish, in the second decade of the 21st century.

Biz Stone is right: "A more connected world leads to a more empathic world." That is after all one of the pillars of co-intelligence, of the belief that none of us is as smart as all of us.

It is going to be the most interesting decade ever. You heard it here first!

Disclosure: I have never been a huge proponent of blogging, as made transparent by this 2007 article.