Comments on: Social Media or Industrial Media? Humans and Other Animals

By: social cache: we deal in uncommon cents. » Blog Archive » P&G Digital Head Ted McConnell Smells the Coffee - Social Network Advertising Won’t Work

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:43:12 +0000

[...] When we wrongly consider technology as a ‘new’ medium that simply and efficiently transformed culture, business and society, we forget our own human ancestry. We leave out Nature. In our hearts we want to belong, to share; we fear dying alone and as we age we become thanatophobic - we fear dying. Individuality is an illusion. [By that I don't mean an individual's style, taste, fashion etc, things that set us apart aesthetically from others, I mean we are forever bound to being social animals.] Read the rest of these thoughts here. [...]

By: Ethan Bauley

Ethan Bauley — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:57:25 +0000

Dave, thanks so much for keeping this discussion going! And I’m really tickled to hear that a term like “industrial media” is novel enough to be considered “Google bait”!

Again, for the record, the phrase is a 1st degree derivation of Benkler’s “industrial information economy” construct. To my mind, “media” is shorthand for “information economy”.

(e.g. “What business is he in?” “Oh, he’s in media.”)

(Even that example points to what has come to be one of the fundamental issues around the broader discussion about “social media”…the denotations and connotations are often wildly different…and grammatical misuse is rampant. So I’m hoping the Wikipedia article will evolve more as a “catalog of usage” and connotations. But I digress…)

Regarding “advertising on social networks”, let me offer a couple of quick thoughts:

1. Although we’ve entered an age of “reverse markets”/VRM, etc, I think a 3rd-generation form of useful marketing could be “in-stream” advertising where marketers, verrrrry carefully, can provide value by “enhancing serendipity” (i.e. informing them of new things they would like but didn’t know about before). Check out this blog post and this guy’s comment to see what I’m talking about: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/09/its-time-to-ope.html#comment-2455204

2. You’re totally right about people “lying” on their social network profiles. I think there’s kind of an interesting duality here though, which is: ESPECIALLY in meatspace, we prefer to present different pictures of ourselves depending on who’s looking (And I wonder how/if the orangutans pictured above deal with that).

@Richard Stacy
Exactly! Gutenberg media is killer. Even wonkier than “industrial”??

You could argue to drop the term “media”, but one thing I’ve been saying lately is “software-mediated communication”. FWIW

By: Richard Stacy

Richard Stacy — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:00:25 +0000

A better word than Industrial / Traditional / Mass media, in my opinion, is Gutenberg Media - i.e. the media that the Gutenberg revolution spawned on the basis that publishing, now possible, was expensive and therefore mediated / institutionalised.

You could in fact argue that we should drop the term media altogether, because it implies mediation. In the new “social information” space information passes between people without institutionalised mediation - that is its principle defining characteristic