Software, Software Development and other Atrocities

Social networking and social media are concepts that define activities that integrate people and technology. These activities can take written form as in online conversations, oral form as in video or audio streams or visual form as in video again and pictures. Social media can also be seen as the places where you go to have social interactions (in many forms as stated above) with other people.

Social media has this enormous and growing audience of people hungry for online interactions. Millions of people use social media and it has become one of the most popular online activities. This is why, I think, it has become a very attractive gold mine for wolves.

Yes, marketers and strategists see social media as places they can use to do their business and to increase their profits. I see this as interference, as having uninvited guests in a house party(1). Businesses have their own places on the web, they can also have their own forums, online communities, etc., if they wish. However as real social networking sites are more populated they are potentially more fertile lands for businesses to grow profits. Yes, it is easier to go where the people are than make people come to them.

Have a look at http://mashable.com/2009/08/03/what-is-social-media

By engaging into apparent social interactions with real people they want to gain their trust and make them buy their products or follow their religion. Marketers and strategists accounts in Social Networking Sites (SNS) are in fact social masks that they wear to appeal to their public. But those are not the real them. In reality marketers and strategists have their own agenda: make money out of you. They do not want to be friends with you they just want to sell you things, they do not want to listen to you they want you to listen to them.

I do not blame them. That is how businesses have done business for years. Before, they kept themselves to their places. Slowly they claimed territory into our private lives, in the newspapers that we read, on the TV, and now into our online social interactions. This had to come sooner or later, and I think we will get used to that. What worries me though is that by carrying out this invasion they are changing the nature of these spaces. They are taking the social out of the social media and adding the profit to their business playground. In fact they are misusing and subverting SNS in a way that potentially threatens their existence.

For example I do not mind a few ads on Facebook but I mind too many. I mind strange accounts sending me messages about buying this or that, or reading this website about god knows what! Facebook is an excellent SNS exactly because you can have social interactions there. You can do all the non sense you like. You can talk to your friends, you can gossip or bitch. You can share your photos and videos, you can fill these stupid questionnaires, or eat fortune cookies, or you can follow your favourite music band or charity organisation. That is what Facebook is about. If it gets infected by people who think I am their audience or their customer I will not like it anymore.

There is one place though where marketers and strategists fit better: Twitter. Twitter is this strange place where people talk to everyone and to anyone at the same time (unless you are using the @.) Some people on Twitter are geeks, some are egocentric, some are normal (like me) and some of them are into business. Thousands of people join Twitter to advertise themselves or their businesses. I can post links to this blog and tell people hey there is a new post! Promoting or advertising things on Twitter is an accepted practice even though that does not answer Twitters question “What are you doing?” but who cares if people are happy. On Twitter promotion and advertising do not feel as intrusive as in other sites. This, perhaps, is because Twitter is very impersonal and has very low social presence. Twitter is more media than social. What Twitter has is a very high rate of exchange of information and lots of potential readers (or buyers!)


There are other kinds of interference attempted into social media. One of them is by eLearning. Some people would like to use real SNS to teach and I cannot understand why. The fact that children and teenagers use these sites a lot does not mean that they will welcome their teachers or their classes there. I however think that social networks, web2.0 type of tools can be used for teaching, but in separate spaces where purposes are clearly defined and the word educational replaces the word social. Have a look at http://monitorhypothesis.typepad.com/esl/2008/07/facebook-and-i.html Added later --> I also think that initiatives such as eGovernance can make good use of web2.0 kind of environments because citizens are familiar with them. And I think I would welcome their intrusion into my social network as long as they are kept minimal and seek citizens' benefit.

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(1) This view is perhaps influenced by my understanding of social media as online communities. In fact I think social media is just another buzzword that represents the latest step in the evolution of online communities.