Real-Time and Social Networks Isn’t Everything
I am in, what I will broadly call, The Internet Business.
If you’re in the business, what you hear a lot is that real-time and social (and geo) are the future. Recently I heard this notion expressed as (paraphrasing, because I forget exactly where I read it):
Google and the other search engines are becoming irrelevant because, in the future, you won’t get most of your information from web pages, but you’ll get it from other people via social networks.
The prototypical example: the other day Lisa, my wife, called me at the office while she was in the car and said, “hey, traffic is horrible downtown…something is going on…will you look online to see what it is?”
As a dutiful husband, I did. First, I looked on Google, then some of the local news web sites, and finally searching on Twitter gave me the result I was looking for: there was a protest march blocking one of the avenues.
That was very cool: getting real-time information from other people about what was happening. There aren’t enough news reporters in the world to give the kind of coverage that everyone with smartphone and a Twitter account can give.
So, I’ll grant you the fact that in the future we might get a lot of information via social networks. But, real-time and social networks isn’t everything.
Yesterday, I made a trip out to the University of Washington for a TEDx Seattle event. (I am a UW alum, so it was fun to be back on campus—I hadn’t been there in a few years.) At the event, I struck up a conversation with a faculty member who I know, and to make a long story short, as part of the conversation Karl Marx was referenced, as in, “well, isn’t that like what Marx said?”
What Marx said exactly is irrelevant to this story. The real point is that Marx’ philosophies are still relevant today, yet a) they’re are not floating around real-time social networks, and b) they’re only marginally on the web. Where are they? They’re in books.
Typically, I read for awhile every night before bed, and last night was no different. So, like a dutiful technophile, I grabbed my Kindle (for the iPhone) and downloaded Marx’s Communist Manifesto. As I was perusing it, Lisa enters the story again:
Lisa: What are you reading?
Me: Karl Marx, he came up today and I wanted to remind myself about his ideas.
Lisa: Seems like that’s something that would be better read in a book.
Like usual, she has a point. Marx seems best read in a café, with a cup of coffee and a cigarette (if you smoke, I don’t).
What I’m afraid of is the more we embrace real-time and social as a panacea, the more we’ll lose and forget valuable and vital ideas and information. Important ideas that help us better understand the world and cause us to be better educated human beings, societies and civilizations.
I’m not saying real-time and social don’t have value—earlier in this article I have illustrated exactly how they do. The point is they’re not everything: whether you read Marx on paper in a book or on a screen, you’re never going to read him in real-time or on a social network.
It’s interesting to consider how radical new ideas might get introduced today. Certainly ideas with any “substance” would merit a book by the author of the idea but I wonder if we might first notice something original by the real-time attention it’s getting (e.g. “Whoa! Mind-blowing presentation by @kmarx at Ignite Berlin. Must check out his blog and kindle his book.”)
Evan Jacobs
21 Sep 10 at 10:51 am
Scott, you need to be on Intersect, so that I can “borrow” your story.
What you are describing — the claims of ascendency of real-time info versus search engines — seems mired in the American ethic that “there can be only one.” From the SuperBowl to Miss America, from the Academy Awards to this year’s poet laureate, from the WorldSeries to Survivor …. even the Mac/PC wars: these examples show that our cultural metaphor is “winning” as though one trumps everyone else. (Obligatory nod to The Matrix.)
The truth is messier. Just as radio did not “kill” newspapers and TV did not kill radio, communication channels morph and change over time. But each channel changed how messages reach certain sets of consumers — or, to flip that around — members of society now had choice in how to obtain information. [The fact that most get their "news" from TV I'll relegate to a conversation for another day!]
The emergence of geolocation-based information adds another filter to information that flows across the Net. I do believe it will become more important in the U.S. as more folks own smartphones with data plans.
But that doesn’t mean that making your websites easy to use (a side-benefit of good SEO implementation, IMO) isn’t necessary or useful!
Evan’s point about discovery (the flip side of introduction) is also interesting. It’s the first time I’ve seen kindle as a verb.
Kathy
21 Sep 10 at 12:59 pm
Just to play the counterpoint: maybe what we need is a great and timely way to inject the best ideas of days gone by in to the realtime stream. Think about how great newscasts are put together: mixed in with the breaking news there’s a piece about the anniversary of some event, a retrospective on the career of someone who’s passed away, analysis comparing a similar historical event to the current era, etc.
OK, maybe I’m just talking about NPR.
Dan Shapiro
21 Sep 10 at 11:21 pm