The demise of social media and the return of mass media

“Social media” is a misnomer, it’s a construct created to facilitate further selling of advertising space online. I agree that social media days are numbered, but mass media is increasingly becoming nothing more than a huge conglomeration of content generators and disseminators. The balance of power has moved to online groupings (some call them ‘communities’) who use infrastructures like Facebook and Twitter as well as auto-publishing facilities like Blogs, to network socially, exchange content, form opinions and views and generate calls to action on almost all issues that affect our lives today. Mass media may continue churn out mounds of content, but the value and usability (is it “popularity”?) of that content will ultimately be judged in social groupings, online.

Sorry – but this is a red herring or at best sensationalism in headline writing, everything you are describing is social media not mass media or is it an exercise in splitting hairs and writing academic definitions. To talk about the return of mass media you can only be referring to the media that was distributed in the way it was or else it would not be referred to as returning. Content that is written by a journalist for the NYT and which i may share via twitter and facebook is social – because i shared it.

That many legacy thinkers are trying to set social into a format they understand and trying to make it look like legacy media is without question, that people are interacting online in communities of their own formation and sharing ideas (and brands are ideas) is also without question.

I sat in a social media conference a week or two back and heard speaker after speaker rambling on abt their social strategy approach – all of which was really – if we can do this then we can make social look like mass/legacy media and we can control it. Total nonsense.

“Very few people write blogs or produce any type of media these days” That statement might not seem so ridiculous to me if you would have backed it up with a single fact from a study, or any other kind of data. I see places like YouTube where users are posting all kinds of content. I look at pictures from friends of places they visit and things they do on Facebook. Guess what? If I check in at a location and say that I am having fun at a Rolling Stones concert, it’s no different than if a “Journalist” wrote a short story about The Rolling Stones being in town. You may want to reconsider your definition of “media”. You seem to look at the word as a link to a long-winded, fact-starved, opinion column. I however, do not, and that is exactly why I will not be tweeting anything about your work here. It’s simply not news.