People have been calling social media a fad for years now. So it's interesting to actually go back and look at the definition of 'Fad':
A fashion that is taken up with great enthusiasm for a brief period of time; a craze
An intense but short-lived fashion
A personal whim
Keywords like "brief", "intense" and "Short-Lived" immediately jump out of those definitions, which doesn't seem to tie very well with the fact that Social Media technology in its current form has been widely used for over seven years.
Friendster was founded in 2002 and has over 90 million users today. MySpace followed soon after in 2004 and rapidly grew to the number one social network until Facebook, currently with 250 million active users recently outgrew it. In my mind it's hard to argue that such hugely popular technology, available for the last 7 plus years and continually developing is only a fad.
There is certainly an element of confusion when people talk about Social Media and what it is, what it isn't, and if it's here to stay. This can be largely due to discussions on the subject getting blinkered into talking about the various networks or services rather than the underlying shift in how people want to communicate online.
The Twitter service is an interesting one. It's ranked as the third most used social network and gets around 55 million visits a month. Yet it's a very different network from the likes of Facebook or MySpace. Personally Twitter drove me mad for ages. I felt it was saturating the internet with meaningless mundane chatter.
Certainly that aspect of the service is still there, but its real value as a global, user generated news and communication service has since become apparent. And as a publicity tool for any business, particularly ones with little or no advertising budget, its importance can't be underestimated.
You could fill a football stadium full of everything that's been written, good and bad, about social media over the past few years. But I think it's safe to say at this stage that whatever Social Media is, it's definitely not a fad.
Related tags: Social Media
said about 10 months ago
Thanks for the feedback Kath.
Its a really interesting subject, theres been so much written about the big Social Media networks, and a lot of extreme viewpoints, either demonising them or singing their praises.
Its certainly not all about whatever business (or political) agendas are behind the Facebooks and MySpaces out there.
If individuals take a balanced approach to human relationships; whether they be face to face, emails, phone calls, OR interacting over social networks, then I think technology like this is great and ultimately helps people.
Kath
said about 10 months ago
Interesting article. I read another post recently which suggested that contrary to popular belief, social media use does not marginalize or depersonalize users, it actually enhances 'real world' interactions too - Good to know!