The Future of Social Media is.....much like its past?

The topic of last night's London Social Media club session was the Future of Social Media. As is the usual format, we kicked off with a talk to set the scene and then went on to group discussion. Antony Mayfield gave the talk, drawing the strong parallels between the first major comms revolution (the printing press) and the internet revolution.

Comrade Delaney has covered the talk and some of the issues well in his Samizdata on the event, so I will just add few other thoughts I had.

- the last time round, people met in coffee houses and pubs in London to swop ideas, and then went forth to disseminate via the short form media (broadsides, libels, pamphlets etc) of the day. Today, we meet in coffee houses and pubs.....

- The 50-year view - when there are changes in communication systems, that tends to drive major socioeconomic and political changes over time, and this process is only just starting this time round

There was quite a bit of good natured teasing of the Seesmic fraternity, I was quite heartened by what I see as a much more sceptical look at the latest New New Things than we saw in the early days of Social Nets (I want to know how Seesmic will make money despite the costs of video-twitting if Twitter can't with text...)

As is our wont, we then split into groups to talk about various subtopics, I proposed one on the "longer game" of the changes social media will make. And again as is our wont, we covered a huge amount of ground but no hard conclusions - however, here are some of the areas we covered:

- we have a sentimental view about what we value in our societies and social networks, which is not really the same as what we actually do - we say we like local life for example, yet we are embracing the new technology to re-form our social networks around people with similar interests, not similar postcodes. As more people come online, this trend will continue. (We tend to use local social nets for discovering services, global ones for discovering friends). Ditto we apparently say we love local markets, local shopkeepers etc but we are increasingly ordering online from anywhere. These trends will reform the way local neighbourhoods operate over time.

- over the next 5-10 years, the gap between IP / Copyright law and what is actually occurring will widen. history tells us that the law slowly changes (as todays vested interests slowly exit) to meet the new reality, but there will be major arbitrage in the next few years.

- town geeks vs country geeks - across the planet more people are coming into cities, it is easier to "wire" these up, so the real dynamic of joining the 'Net will be a city by city, not a country by country one (In fact, many 3rd world cities were more connected at the End of Empire than they are even now).

- the technologies of electronic social networking - listservers, groupware, social networks of various types - come and go, we use whatever we need to in order to reach the people we want to reach. In fact there is an argument that some of the older tools (email, listservers, IM)are more powerful than the Twitters, Facebooks etc of today, but you go to where your social networks are

- new wine, old bottles - "social graphs", "social objects" yadds yadda have existed forever - they are just the latest jargon words for things that we humans have done since we discovered language (and probably before). What we do think is that electronic media allows us to keep more in contact (keeping tabs with old friends doings on a SocNet) with more people (its just quicker to ping a mail, a Twitter etc). Question - does this mean we will expand our "Dunbar numbers" because we can communicate more easily, or are we more deeply wired to limit our social Nets?

And as is also our wont, we usually move on to socially network in the pub - which is in itself telling, in that it is very clear that we still like to cement our relationships, even with new-found friends found with state odf the art technology, in very old fashioned ways.