On The Web, Social Media is Just Media

On one of the training course I teach in sunny Sutton, I make the point that, from its earliest days, the internet was a social medium: usenet, irc, BBSes, e-mail discussion lists and forums were all early ways of socialising the internet experience. We in the traditional media took a detour into shovelware websites that emulated our print products, while the web got on with inventing new forms of social publishing,  like blogs, wikis, social networks and microblogging.

And now we have to join in, or be left in the dust. Social media isn’t some bolt-on to a publishing strategy – it is the publishing strategy for the web.  It doesn’t matter if it’s journalism in a blog, content curating through social networks, or workflow tools with a social graph attached, the ability to do things in concert with others is the defining feature of the web, and using “social media” in opposition to “media” makes it too easy to forget that.

Incidentally, I don’t see “anti-social media” as an insult. There are times when I want to sit down and read a book or magazine all on my own. That’s great. But it’s not the growth market.That’s the web That’s the social publishing environment.