Collide Magazine

Around these parts, we love social media. At the same time, it’s always a good idea to examine our infatuation with new technology and the adulation we ascribe to it. Scott Berkun is a writer, speaker, and blogger who has had it up to here (holds hand parallel to the ground at chin level) with people going overboard about the revolutionary magnificence of social media. In response, he wrote an essay that you should only click on if you don’t mind reading something with profanity in its title (HT: @johndyer).

Berkun begins his shrewd analysis by saying, “While I like and use Facebook and Twitter, there’s enough hype and abuse of words like innovation, transformation and revolution around all things social media that a critique is warranted – if only to  take a shot at calibrating how people talk about this stuff.” From there, he offers several keen observations that should both validate the (wise) use of social media and temper the enthusiasm of those worship at its altar. Here are my four favorite thoughts from the piece:

• If anything has happened recently it’s not the birth of social networks, it’s the popularity of digital tools for social networks, which is something different.
• It’s wise to ask what each kind of media / marketing is good and bad for and work from there.
• If you are interested in quality, and not volume, then the size of your network matters less than the value of what’s in it. (Blogger’s note: A lot of us church leaders need to embrace that paradigm both on- and offline.)
  
• Blogs and Twitter have made self promotion, and self-aggrandizement, acceptable in ways I’ve never seen before, and I’m guilty myself.

There’s more where that came from, so read for yourself (again … if you won’t get mad at me because there’s a naughty word in the title). Of course, it bears mentioning that I discovered the link on Twitter and you’re discovering it on a blog–so no one’s advocating for a mass exodus from social media.

Happy reading.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 8:07 am and is filed under Tech, The Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.