The day Social Media jumped the shark ?

If you read Techmeme, the aggregator of news in the Technosphere, you may not have noticed that the world's financial markets nearly collapsed yesterday and that the world is again looking at a 1930's style Great Depression scenario. You would not know that artist Damien Hirst flogged off £70m of "fine art" including the Formaldehyde Shark above - nor will you know that art prices nearly always reach top levels at the same time that commercial property development hits the point where it implodes, which is the guaranteed signal of recession.

You will, of course, be very well aware of the latest Apple, Blackberry, Google etc shiny shiny stuff though. On Twitter there is at least a small frisson of financial awareness, but its hidden amongst the relentless self promotion of the social media community managers, marketers and mediarati. Facebook has decided you may only have friends it approves of, and that has led Danah Boyd into discussions of the minutiae of how many social network definitions you can lay at the pins of an angel.

There is a certain disconnect, shall we say - or, as the ever grumpy Steven Hodson puts it, there is a risk social media is a circle-jerk disappearing up its own ars.....techie ecosysytem:

We are in a potenially dangerous position of losing ourselves in the very thing that we are trying to promote. We seem to be spending more and more time talking amongst ourselves instead of showing those behind us the safe road forward. We have a responsibilty to but aside our own grandious ideals of what social media could be and layout the good and the bad of what social meia is. We aren’t doing that - instead we are all sitting around some campfire patting ourselves on the back about how cutting edge we are.

People - the factory worker, the secretary, the school teacher (remember Julie Amero?) or even your own families don’t care about the rarified ideals of what social media might bring. They are looking to us to help keep them safe and show them what the best tools are or what the worst ones are and why.

Heck, just reflecting on the huge events going on around us would be nice for starters!. As Alexander Van Elsas writes this morning:

I feel that our current Hallelujah over web 2.0 social media technology fails to address the First Use question. Yes it is cool to be able to participate in discussions with potentially thousands of people on the web. Sure it’s great to track these discussions, to be able to find new stuff via aggregators, to be able to friend tons of interesting people. To be part of an never ending global discussion. But what does it all boil down to in the end? What is the value of that for your daily life, especially when you are not part if the in-crowd of Silicon Valley or the tech industry?

Does this means that Social News - and by extension Social Media in general, I submit - has jumped its shark - but without crossing its chasm? Today makes me think it has.

(Update - Its now evening, and I see a Lehman related story on Techmeme now - about IT spend and an interview with H&Q's Bill Hambrecht on GigaOm touches on these subjects as well. Valleywag noticed this too when the West Coast woke up )