Social might, and that's a hugely stressed "might", have legs as _media_ and the future of it, or at least a portion.
We've been watching the accelerating descent of traditional text and audio media, and more recently video, for the past 20 years. I've had a few epiphanies on this myself in the past year or so:
1. "New media" actually is a pretty decent term. Much of tech -- pretty much most of it that concerns person-to-person exchange (as opposed as machine-to-machine systems controls and feedback) is effectively media. We should think of Facebook, Google, and Apple as largely media companies. Amazon straddles this line more with a focus on commerce, it's also quite directly a media player through books and music.
2. Magazines were created in the 19th century as aggregators of short-form narrative (fiction and non) as a crossover between individual pamphlets and full-length books. Improved print and distribution mechanisms promoted their spread, and by the first quarter of the 20th century several major periodicals still surviving (somewhat) had emerged. In a sense a magazine was a large bundle you could buy for a single set price. The individual items might or might not all appeal, but many or most would. It was stepping back the purchase boundary from the individual piece to the collection.
3. One thing that's happening now is that we're both disaggregating individual periodicals, and creating new aggregations at a larger scale. Hacker News is one of many options for selecting individual items pulled from diverse publishers. The concept's been around as long as there've been mailing lists and newsgroups -- comp.risks has cited various articles and news pieces since the mid-1980s. RSS syndication, Slashdot, Digg, and reddit, Facebook or G+ or Ello feeds, etc., all do much the same thing. What they don't generally do is directly compensate authors.
We're starting to see some changes in that regard, with Facebook apparently negotiating directly with publishers such as The New York Times to publish material directly to Facebook. I'm not sold (I don't do FB), but it's an interesting development.
I've been suggesting a broadband tax or similar automatic payment syndication scheme as a major, if not necessarily the only compensation model (see also Phil Hunt of Pirate Party UK and his broadband tax proposal). Google or major ISPs might also enter into this (or be forced to).
The negative on the future of Social is that social media networks seem to be awfully fragile and capritious. Facebook's fall could well be as fast as Myspace's was.
We've been watching the accelerating descent of traditional text and audio media, and more recently video, for the past 20 years. I've had a few epiphanies on this myself in the past year or so:
1. "New media" actually is a pretty decent term. Much of tech -- pretty much most of it that concerns person-to-person exchange (as opposed as machine-to-machine systems controls and feedback) is effectively media. We should think of Facebook, Google, and Apple as largely media companies. Amazon straddles this line more with a focus on commerce, it's also quite directly a media player through books and music.
2. Magazines were created in the 19th century as aggregators of short-form narrative (fiction and non) as a crossover between individual pamphlets and full-length books. Improved print and distribution mechanisms promoted their spread, and by the first quarter of the 20th century several major periodicals still surviving (somewhat) had emerged. In a sense a magazine was a large bundle you could buy for a single set price. The individual items might or might not all appeal, but many or most would. It was stepping back the purchase boundary from the individual piece to the collection.
3. One thing that's happening now is that we're both disaggregating individual periodicals, and creating new aggregations at a larger scale. Hacker News is one of many options for selecting individual items pulled from diverse publishers. The concept's been around as long as there've been mailing lists and newsgroups -- comp.risks has cited various articles and news pieces since the mid-1980s. RSS syndication, Slashdot, Digg, and reddit, Facebook or G+ or Ello feeds, etc., all do much the same thing. What they don't generally do is directly compensate authors.
We're starting to see some changes in that regard, with Facebook apparently negotiating directly with publishers such as The New York Times to publish material directly to Facebook. I'm not sold (I don't do FB), but it's an interesting development.
I've been suggesting a broadband tax or similar automatic payment syndication scheme as a major, if not necessarily the only compensation model (see also Phil Hunt of Pirate Party UK and his broadband tax proposal). Google or major ISPs might also enter into this (or be forced to).
The negative on the future of Social is that social media networks seem to be awfully fragile and capritious. Facebook's fall could well be as fast as Myspace's was.