The syndication of me
Published on 2010-03-23
“Self expression is the new entertainment” said Arianna Huffington from Huffington Post at the O´Reilly Publishing conference a month ago. I was there, and now and then this sentence comes to mind. She said it as a positive comment on why we are abandoning our TV sets (are we?) and instead pour our selves in to social media. She could have chosen the word “communication”. She could have chosen “interactivity” … or “community engagement” or …. She did not. She chose “self expression”. I think she is right, though, we are living in a time where individualism is the haute couture and media time is the measure of success.
Arianna surely meant the techniques which are used in so called “social media” like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace. In my mind internet activity like forums and chat are social two way communication tools the structures of which “forces” the users to act on an equal level. These existed before we developed and defined the web 2.0 and “social media”. Arguably the main working streams in Twitter and Facebook (and blogs) are one way communication tools with a commenting facility. Individuals can subscribe to what I am writing and by this I am guaranteed to be noticed. Having a commenting facility and the automatic syndication is of course fantastic (until you get frustrated by not getting any comments). Facebook has a lot of functionality supplementing the status tool and Twitter is an effective tool for announcing news and moods if so wished. They are both excellent types of software and this is shown by their amazing success. Blogs gives a lot of people an easy and free message channel (like this one). Huffington Post, by the way, developed from a blog to an internet newspaper. But Twitter, Facebook and blogs are not mainly forms of direct social interactivity. This is because they are very much based on syndication. The syndication of me.
