The Real Criticisms of Social Media

Cory Doctorow has a piece rebutting "Social Media Deniers" in the Grauniad. Its good as far as it goes, here are the straw-man criticisms and rebuttals (expurgated version):

It's inconsequential – most of the verbiage on Twitter, Facebook and the like is banal blather

Yes, it certainly is. The reason for that is that most of it is "social grooming" – messages passed between friends and family members as a way of maintaining social cohesion. The meaning of the messages isn't "u look h4wt dude" or "wat up wiv you dawg?" That's merely the form. The meaning is: "I am thinking of you, I care about you, I hope you are well."


It is ugly – MySpace is a graphic designer's worst nightmare

The word you're looking for isn't "ugly", it's "vernacular". Graphic designers are paid to clearly communicate messages (both covert and overt) to strangers on behalf of clients. Kids who bling out their MySpace pages do so because they are exuberant and playful.


It is ephemeral – Facebook will blow over in a year and something else will be along

Totally correct, but this is a feature, not a bug. The technology that underpins social media is changing fast, and social media companies' bone-deep intuitions about what it should and shouldn't do are made obsolete every 18 months or so. Most of these companies won't be able to adapt. They will die, and be replaced by a new generation of social media companies who have better, more contemporary sensibilities.

But what disappointed me was that these are NOT what the smart observers are criticising Social Media for. And Cory knows it, as in his last paragraph he notes:

There are plenty of things to worry about when it comes to social media.

They are Skinner boxes designed to condition us to undervalue our privacy and to disclose personal information. They have opaque governance structures. They are walled gardens that violate the innovative spirit of the internet.

To which I'd add worrying evidence of Social Mob Rule. I just wish that Cory had spent as much time in the article looking at these far more serious flaws rather than the fairly trivial ones above. As a recent blog post by Bill Sledzik noted, there is a risk in Social media circles that the wish to be seen to be positive (or just join the hype) is impeding real analysis.

It’s easy to confuse critical thinking with negativity, and it happens way too much in social media circles. Those wont to criticize the dominant coalition of SM — or even the more popular personalities — risk being shouted down or even frozen out of discussions. It’s part of the “play nice” etiquette that can lead folks to embrace group-think.

I was reminded of social media’s coziness this past week by Mark Schaefer’s post likening the social web to high-school cliques.

The post is titled "Don’t let ‘positive thinking’ impede critical analysis". We need to keep that in mind