Is Social Media A Fad?
January 26, 2012 – 3:33 pm | by Daryl Tay
I was having lunch with one of my professors and he asked “Do you think social media is a fad?”.
My answer was an adamant “no” (I mean, this is my career we’re talking about here).
There are many people who have cynically looked at the evolution of platforms like Friendster and MySpace and Facebook and now Google Plus and think it’s a waste of time investing either time or money (or both) into any of these platforms, because they will eventually change.
By that logic we should have stopped advertising in the newspapers when radio and television came along.
They key that these cynics are missing, is that what is changing is the platform, not “social media” as a whole.
If we peel back the layers to when email and bulletin boards first existed, the main use of the “internet” (not even social media) was to communicate (emails to friends overseas) and share (anything from photography tips to fan fiction on various bulletin boards).
In that sense, nothing has changed. Maybe we don’t email picture attachments of a new baby to relatives halfway across the globe anymore, but you can be sure they’ll see those pictures on Facebook, or Flickr, or Instagram, or Path.
Social media taps into a form of human nature that can’t be changed – the desire to communicate, share and connect.
Maybe there isn’t one central place to talk about comics like an rec.arts newsgroup anymore (hands up if you remember those), but now you can do it on blogs and share links on Twitter and exchange ideas on Facebook and the trend continues.
Once upon a time we may have expressed this nature by clipping out an interesting magazine article and sending it to a friend via snail mail for a one-to-one interaction. Now we look for the one click “share” button on the blog’s website and publish it to Facebook where one share can reach many.
Social media isn’t a fad. It’s evolving to be smarter and more sophisticated and perhaps more importantly, easier than ever before, and in doing do fulfilling out need to reach to people like us to be and feel connected.
What that desire goes away, maybe then social media will fizzle out and die like previous fads like pogs, disco and poofy hair.
Tags: advertising, bulletin boards, email, facebook, flickr, friendster, google plus, instagram, internet, is social media a fad, myspace, newsgroup, newspapers, path, radio, rec.arts, share, social media, social media fad, television
