In response to your pessimism about the marketing angle, I share that with you. I counter it for myself with (hopefully not blind) optimism that the obnoxious marketers will fade into the noise.

Since Twitter search is arguably the current leverage point for accurately influencing and targeting audiences, and since we can ‘unfollow’ people, I hope that marketers and others who authentically connect with audiences who value them will prevail in the signal.

The marketing spam on Twitter annoys me and I just block it out and focus on the conversations, people and companies that use social media responsibly like a good friend or neighbor.

Your views help me to not go too over the top. Since my loves are psychology, communication, relationships, marketing and technology I’m in heaven on social media and I’m not the typical user. I spend time with a lot of people from 20-70 years old to keep in touch with multiple perspectives, but my enthusiasm for social media can override good critical thinking sometimes.

That’s a great rebuttal. I have to say I don’t find myself TOO far off your position, but there are some small but significant problems I have with the revolutionary nature of social media (I’m getting away from the direct reference to the industrial revolution, because as you’d probably agree, it’s hard to compare ‘epochal’ moments).

You said you can’t think of anything that has revolutionized communication to this extent since the industrial revolution, and I think you’re right (although how many times has THAT been said, with TV, the telephone, radio, email, etc.). I’ll give you that social media is different, allows for a greater democratization of communication, but that really it’s just a new, stronger form of previous iterations of mass communication.

I think it’s perhaps too easy to get caught up in the ‘supremacy’ of social media, and blow it out of proportion. Now it’s always difficult at the beginning of a ‘revolution’ of this sort to see the long term implications, so we’re both looking into the crystal ball here a little bit, but I’m not sure that social media will play that large a role in changing our global culture. It will allow us a greater chance to interact, and who can know precisely what those interactions will create, but I’m not sure what role it will play as a ‘driver’ for those outcomes.

What we’re talking here is about causality, right? And I’m not sure if I’m totally comfortable saying that social media will be the driver for change you see it as. Part of the problem with this sort of technology is what we make of it, so perhaps this is my pesimistic side coming out. I worry about the marketers co-opting social media, as I mentioned, but also peoples’ general simplistic nature, and that there is the real concern that social media will mostly (obviously not entirely) just become a megaphone (to use your term) for peoples narcacism; a place to post photos of bar nights and beach-wear, plan parties, and waste time.

You say you have made great contacts through social media, and I don’t doubt that, but I think most (North American) people won’t be as efficient. I do think, however (as an International Development practioner), that there is greater potential in developing countries to truly make revolutionary use of this technology. So, and this is really just personal, but I will wait to see what others can make out of social media, before I put it on too high a pedestal.

And maybe then we’ll find out if the revolution will be–or won’t be– Twitterized, blogged, or Facebooked (all respect to Gil Scott Heron).

Marketing online will learn to be a two-way conversation with interested parties or it will not only be ineffective and innocuous, but will drive customers away & generate bad word of mouth. No matter how big a slice of the social media marketplace it takes, it can’t overtake the global meeting place aspects that you mention.

Social media is a medium that facilitates action and as a conduit it allows great things to happen that would otherwise not happen at all or would take much longer. I’ve had social media conversations with CEO’s, experts and teenagers that I wouldn’t have ever had access to, but who have significantly helped me with business and computer problems. Companies like Zappos, Comcast and Dell are shifting what’s possible with customer service and sales operations with social media strategies.

When you mention the face-to-face learning aspect it reminds me of how social media is looked at as a ‘versus’ proposition to IRL (in real life.) I disagree with the positioning of it replacing anything and see it as an ‘addition to’ IRL and how we’ve always gone about living. Personally, Twitter has facilitated more personal and professionally beneficial relationships for me than anything I’ve ever done. Most of those relationships started online and moved to IRL and now go on both online and offline, while many of them have remained only online and are still valuable.

In the Iranian example using Twitter, tweeting was an online action that protesters used to share their offline actions in ways that impacted millions of people who would have not known what was happening there. The revolution was both in individuals courageously protesting as well as in Twitter helping to change the world by giving online megaphones to the individuals which allowed them to reach millions of others.

I agree with you that we’re not there yet, but at this point it’s a significant player that may just yet become the next industrial revolution (in how powerfully it alters so many aspects of our lives) by what new actions it allows us to take and how magnified our efforts of influence can now be.

So I’m the guy who said that your blog post was hyperbole. While I admit that when I wrote that tweet I hadn’t yet looked at your post, I was reacting to the the main thrust of your tweet–that social media will change societ to an extent not seen since the industrial revolution.

I do generally agree that social media is more than a fad, and part of a longer-lasting trend. Social media has, and will probably continue to be, a widely adopted technology that lets people interact and share information in new and novel ways. What I reject, however, is the idea that social media will change our society to the same extent as the industrial revolution, which brough millions if not billions of people out of poverty, went on to lay the foundation for our current ‘technological age,’ as well as fuelled the over-production and consumption of goods which caused the current climate-change crisis. Those are big boots to fill!

What I see as the over-emphasis on the importance of social media reminds me of the book called “The End of History and the Last Man,” by Francis Fukuyama, where he said that democracy has defeated all its competition and represents the final stage of political evolution, to bastardize the entire thesis of his book. He has since (it was written in 1992, and generally disproven on Sept. 11th, 2001) been shown to be wrong, and is slightly apologetic about making such a crazy claim.

While radio, telephones, TV, and the internet, to take a few examples from the video you posted, HAVE had a large impact on the ways we relate to each other, how we consume, and the information we share, they are, at their base, just new ways to communicate/interact. It’s the outcome of these interactions that are truely revolutionary.

Also, my other concern is that social media may fall out of favour (slightly) if it is taken over by social marketers who turn it into a site solely for gurilla marketing campaigns, rather than a global meeting place. But I digress, the most troubling part of the whole argument about the importance of social media goes back to the fact that is a medium, and not, in itself, action.

To take formal education, as an example (I just finished 6 years of undergraduate and graduate education, so I have some expertise here), and go against the argument of the video, online work and social media connections are no replacement for face-to-face learning. While online courses are gaining in popularity (they’re cheaper to administer than real-life lectures), the value to students is usually lacking.

But I want to get back to my main point and argument here, regarding social media’s final impact on society. Think about the role that the Twitter played in the recent protests in Iran. Iranians who were taking part in protests against a government they believed rigged recent elections were tweeting information about the unfair elections, and their mistreatment at the hands of government authorities. While Twitter’s role did help to get knowledge about this cause out to the world, it was those people who were courageously protesting in the streets that made the story–Twitter just reported it.

True revolutions are not about changing the ways we interact, but the way our interactions change the world. At best social media will be a peripherial player to the next ‘industrial revolution’ we see as a global community. But at least it’ll be a great place to meet and disscuss those events!