Social Media? I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means
In the debate over whether Scorched.TV really is social media, I was reminded of this line from one of my favourite movies, The Princess Bride.
Not content with taking Channel 9's word for it, I decided to check out the Scorched.TV site and upload a video of my own. Unfortunately, even when I follow the directions provided by the "EP of CPN" (that is, the executive producer of a fictional news network), the best I could do was to send them an email with my story idea. This is hardly social media.
Social media is relatively simple ... and it looks like the slide below. The way this plays out, however, is complicated -- and is most articulately explained in Michael Wesch's definition of "context collapse" which I talked about here. The defining feature, however, is participation of "users", or "consumers" or "people like me". And until you have those folks involved, creating, changing, mashing and even destroying, then in my book, you don't have social media.
