I’m not a big fan of the term Social Media
. It might be that it translates poorly into Norwegian, the fact that it sounds like its the technology that is social – not how it enables interaction between people or identities, or that I find the term itself invites us to a limited set of ideas in regards to what it can facilitate.
Either way, the following question was sent to me, and several others, from a student, Trude Stokstad, this week:
What will social media be in two years?
- Having a blog makes one fortunate enough to answer a lot of questions from readers, students, enthusiasts or people just being plain curious. This gives you an opportunity to search for answers outside your original train of thought and is surely one of the most important benefits of having a blog.
With the assumption that we will still use the term social media in two years, as media and platforms become more nuanced, difficult to categorize and are having their functionality integrated with each other. I still found three things I think will make a difference:
Three things:
-
1. There will be no social media but social operating systems. There will be an integration of participation and dialogue into everything – or, where it benefits core business models or goals (no more being on Facebook for Facebook’s sake)
.
In the short time span of two years there will still be destinations and sites like Facebook, youtube, linkedin
. But one or more of these databases will own your information and it will be fed out and made accessible on a range of other destinations and services.
This is interesting both in what we are already seeing from services like Facebook Connect, connecting 60 million people to Facebook outside Facebook.com, or the fact that half of all Twitter activity is already taking place off-site.
link: Social media silo
2. In the future our objects will become our friends. We don’t necessarily need to communicate exclusively to people, we communicate with identities that might as well be objects (people follow the Tower Bridge twitter feed or get SMS’s from their plants that their running out of water).
In the future the stuff around us would want to communicate with us and we would in some way interact with that communication.
One could already ask the question if it is people or objects that help us communicate and organize on Nike+ (the sensor in the shoe and the iPod are the ones collecting and creating the data that connects us)?
link: Our future Identities
3
. The language will expand. Today we focus on conscious, tangible communication like the written word or uploaded videos or music
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. This will change and future communication will be in richer forms. Social Media is not about exchanging words and opinions, it’s about sharing ideas, expressed through any language or data.
link: Are we to focused on getting people to talk to us rather than exchanging ideas?
