Social Media Was Pretty Now It’s Going To Get Ugly

Actually it already has got ugly. Subjectivity and how one tells a story and its association with journalistic integrity will continue to overshadow and be overbearing. The recent plethora of conversation, discussion and debate about the super injunction situation in the UK has clearly demonstrated and begun the road to change.

People involved in social media for years have been predicting these occurrences and, as usual, we humans only react to something in the here and now rather than prevention instead of cure. Social media’s romantic session is melting. There are ultimately several areas it’s going to get a little melancholy:

1. Law – what has become very apparent in the last week is that old media, old law, old systems will need to start to conform to new media bringing about new laws, new systems and news behaviours. Definitions and clarifications will be abundant. Twitter is neither the Royal Mail or the Daily Mail?

2. Broadcast – unfortunately, we are already seeing this happen. Brands broadcasting on social media platforms, John Lewis is one of the biggest culprits amongst a myriad of others. Just start ‘liking’ brands on Facebook and it becomes all too apparent. Social means being social, that means two-way conversation not telling and shouting. A lack of comprehension and, lets be honest, laziness will account for a bounty of mundane messaging from brands pressing the inadequate button.

3. It rewards those that are popular or interesting rather that information that is correct. As an optimist I hope that this resolves itself as the people participating in social media drum this out of how social media organises itself. Influence measurement tools such as Klout and PeerIndex will need to recognise the absurdity of this and attempt to remove the insanity although some may argue that if you are popular, you are influential! Reputation and credibility though, is a whole different matter.

4. Vested interests and anti social media. We are still trying to define anti social media but for the purposes of this paper, I see it as the defamatory statements being made on Twitter and Facebook by people to their followers. Wayne Rooney’s famous call for a fight tweets and South Tyneside Councils attempt to find the rogue person making abusive comments about employees and members that are libellous.

It also includes brands trying to buy attention. Rewarding you to ‘like’ them on Facebook, Toyota paying young mothers in Canada to write positive blogs about them to bury bad news, the list goes on. Not social media etiquette in its purest sense. There will be a role in the future for ‘whistle blowers’ people watching the social web to identify and expose such behaviour. Its then up to the ‘crowd’ to decide whether to still follow or to still buy!

5. Corporations and governments starting to try and own the social web. No better stated than in the ensuing Arab uprisings in 2011, Egypt attempting to prevent Google, China banning Facebook. Douglas Rushkoff believes we need a new Internet as we see the signs of government and large brands trying to control. That however, is nothing new! Welcome to capitalism!

Tensions will rise around this issue and it will get both distracting and disturbingly ugly. Issues around privacy will sleek off into the background as the power returns to the streets and lots of people dictate policy rather than the few at the top.