Death to Social Media

It’s been about 18 months since the term “Social Media” first nudged its way into being the answer to the question “what is it that I do?” It’s always been a marriage of convenience rather than one born of true love – I needed a label, something broader than “blogger” (I’ve always maintained that the qualities that make blogging as an activity interesting encompass much more than the blogging platform) but more specific than, well, whatever it is people like me did before the Internet came along. For a while Social Media was that label.

But it was never a comfortable fit. Sometimes it felt right but most of the time it was too tight or a bit baggy and more often than not I’d look at it hanging there of an evening wondering what the hell is was I’d been wearing all day. This sort of constant questioning is not necessarily a bad thing, and I’ve come to accept over the years that I tend to do this a lot, but if you’re not careful you can find yourself quibbling over semantics for the sake of quibbling over semantics and miss the important stuff – the reason why you felt you needed a label in the first place.

I felt I needed a label because I wanted to sell my brain. If I could package my brain up in a nice tidy product then I could stick a price on it and people would be more likely to buy it. And, to a certain extent, it worked – I’ve made a pretty decent living over the last couple of years – yet every time I describe myself as a Social Media Consultant a tiny part of me dies.

Part of this is because I actually met some real Social Media consultants at SXSWi this Spring and decided right there that I didn’t want to be one. Which made the whole “being at SXSWi to develop my Social Media consultancy business” thing rather awkward and prompted a lot of soul searching. But I came to the conclusion that it’s just a label and I can decide what Social Media consultancy is in the context of me, irrespective of what the people who aren’t me are doing with it. A novelist doesn’t worry about all the other people calling themselves novelists – he just gets on a writes novels.

And yet I’m still not comfortable with it, and I think I’ve figured out why.

Social Media isn’t actually very interesting. It’s merely a manifestation of a much more interesting thing – the way the Internet connects people. You might think they’re the same thing but they’re not. Take that other woefully misunderstood term “Web 2.0″ an an example. People think Web 2.0 means sites that harvest and host this phenomena known as “user generated content” (which, by the way, is a horrible term) but it doesn’t mean that. Web 2.0 is about online services talking to each other using standardised data. The reason Flickr is a Web 2.0 service isn’t because it hosts people’s photos. It’s because you can take photos of your city, mix them with Wikipedia pages about your city, add in some Twitter messages from your city and plot them on a Google Map of your city. Automatically. That’s Web 2.0. The idea that people putting stuff on the Internet is this new phenomena enabled by radically new services emerging around 2004 makes one wonder what the hell was going on for the first 30-odd years of the Internet. I’m sorry to say that Web 2.0 is just about data standards that help us do things online better – a Highway Code for information, if you like. Because we’re doing things better it looks like we’re doing something different, but we’re not. We’re just doing more of it faster and in more complex ways.

Social Media is the same. The idea that people have only recently started using media socially is silly. The difference is merely that many more people are doing it and the evidence is a lot more visible. I was doing “Social Media” back in the 90s only we called them fanzines and distributed them through the post. Meanwhile folks were being social on Usenet or on Compuserve forums. Twitter might be an interesting new model for how people socialise and connect through networks but it’s just a model for a pretty normal activity.

In the introduction to Birmingham City University’s MA in Social Media which my good friends from academia Jon Hickman and Dave Harte started this Autumn, the Social Media industry is defined as follows:

There is a dichotomy within this nascent industry. On the one hand established businesses are seeking to co-opt the tools of Social Media and use them for commercial gain; on the other third sector organisations are making use of these tools to build complex and conversational communication strategies for minimal cost.

Considering that was written over 6 months ago it’s not a bad stab and pinning the business side of this stuff down and it helps to illuminate something critical. If businesses are co-opting this stuff for commercial gain and if 3rd sector orgs are devising communication strategies they’re doing so because that’s where they think people are at. And so it follows that wherever the people are at is where society is happening. And so what we’re dealing with here is society in all it’s myriad forms. Like Soylent Green Social Media is people. Nothing more, nothing less. And that, I think, is why we’re all tied up in knots about it. We see this stuff happening on computers so we think it must behave logically, and it does to a certain degree, but then it doesn’t, because it’s people. We think we can use it for marketing because it works for marketing to a certain degree, until it doesn’t, because it’s people. People are weird, always have been, always will be. And people will always try to figure out how to understand and control them.

A while back I started thinking about the future of Social Media as a discipline. I suspected it’d get absorbed into other disciplines from social science to public relations – anything that involves understanding how people communicate and share stuff. What I’m now realising is the process by which what was novel becomes mundane isn’t interesting to me. While I have a mild curiosity about how 20th century industries will adapt and change in the 21st century it’s not where the good stuff is.

A couple of years ago I discovered I had something of value. I discovered this because people started offering to paying me money for it. I didn’t know what it was but it seemed to have something to do with knowing how the Internet worked and being able to explain and contextualise it to people who didn’t know how the Internet worked.

And so, having stumbled into a career I met with business advisors and went on a business development course and it was all good. All the advice I got was great and essential for someone who a couple of years previously was temping in factories and dispatch warehouses. But despite all this I kept thinking I needed to define myself in other people’s eyes. I needed to belong to an industry. I needed a label so I could be part of a thing.

But people weren’t interested in me because I was part of a thing. They were interested in me because I did stuff no-one else was doing and thought about things in ways no-one else they knew was thinking.

When I started on this road I could count the people I considered my peers in this city, the people who I knew really got this stuff, on one hand. And while it might seem harsh I think at most we’re on to two hands these days. Everyone else is applying it. There’s nothing wrong with applying this stuff – I love watching people do that because I can learn from it. But when something is being applied that means it’s pretty much been figured out.

I once went for a job, bidding for a contract to deliver the Social Media part of a thing (forgive the vague – it’s easier that way). I suggested they do a big experiment because it’s be really interesting and they’d learn important stuff about their business. They went with the bid which promised increased sales. And that’s fine. If you want to use the Internet to increase sales then do that. But, frankly, I don’t think that’s very interesting. Using the Internet for that is like using a helicopter to pop to the shops. You’ll get your milk quicker but you’re fundamentally missing the point of a helicopter.

So what is it that I do?

I don’t know what you call what I do. Currently it seems to be based around the Internet and the Arts because that’s where I’ve built my reputation but the work I’ve been doing with the Arts Council’s Digital Content Development fund has been about much more than the Internet and the Arts – it’s been about drilling down to some quite fundamental questions about why people do the things they do. I like drilling down to fundamental questions and I think I’m good at it.

Sure, still do the basic stuff. If you want to pay me to explain how to run your blog or get you running on Twitter then I’ll happily do that. But, as became clear on the Metapod course I co-ran this year for Arts organisations, helping you run your Facebook page isn’t really what I do. Helping you understand what a Facebook page is in the context of how you communicate with people, and in doing so helping you understand how you communicate with people in general, that’s what I do.

I have no idea what you call that but I’ve decided it doesn’t matter. As long as I keep doing things that interest and excite me and keep on learning from them the right people will notice, just as they did back in 2006-7. If I put an easy to understand label on what I do the right people won’t find me interesting and the wrong people will ask me to do boring things.

Hi, I’m Pete Ashton. I divide my time between Birmingham and The Internet and I do things that interest and excite me. What do you do?