Is the social web a thing of the past?
Like a good book you can’t put down, here is a tube in the same category: Elevation Partners Director and Co-Founder Roger McNamee presenting at The Paley Center For Media.
Roger McNamee shares a number of compelling arguments that invite us to think about the social web not in terms of where we think we are, but in terms of where irresistible change is taking us.
Well worth watching…twice:
Facebook, which began as a way to connect students at Harvard, now has a population greater than most countries. The site has become a staple in the lives of many of its 600 million members. It is where people store and share photos, plan and organize events, communicate with the people in their lives. It’s become a hub for news and link/video sharing. It’s a marketing tool, a place to promote one’s business and professional endeavors.
It is also ruining our lives.
The reason why people must trade dollars is that there is no other alternative, and the computer algorithms that control the value of the currency have yet to tell us otherwise. That’s it, really. The questions remain, how, why, and when will people stop working for it and what will they work for which can replace it?
This will not be as simple as living in yurts, trading cheese cultures and tweeting about it. Complex infrastructure like a judicial system, transportation, medical care, clean water, energy and food production rely on a financial system that can capitalize and securitize whatever the replacement currency may be.
Influence vs. intention
The latest twist in the new currency movement is the idea that on-line influence can be used to support a currency. There is no shortage of noble leaders aspiring to “define the standard” in their own image as a service to the lesser masses who seek their respective place in the great new economic void. PeerIndex and Klout are the two main players that promote a social score based on influence, ostensibly to mimic the credit score upon which all currency depends.
Read the rest here »
I remember watching Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us and feeling at the end that something profound had just happened. That was in 2007, not that long ago really. Around the same time I watched Shift Happens and was left similarly inspired by the rate at which my world was changing.
Seeking. You can’t stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges’ instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for information we don’t even care about. Nina Shen Rastogi confessed in Double X, "My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we’re out to dinner." We reach the point that we wonder about our sanity. Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times said she became so obsessed with Twitter posts about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest that she spent days "refreshing my search like a drugged monkey."
Interesting stuff from Universal McCann and their recently released report: Social Media Research Wave 3 [PDF]:
An interesting post on Social Media Explorer ‘Deconstructing Second Life’ questions the value of Second Life based on a review of the virtual world’s demographics:
The demographics show 8.5 million users, but only 561,000 of those are “active.” While nearly 40 percent of the active ones are age 25-34, only 26 percent are from the United States (with Brazil a distant second a 8.5). The numbers show 57 percent of active users are male…
I came across a new social network called projectstars, yet another killer startup. The site touts “blog for stock in the largest enterprise business blogging network” as if to suggest the potential payoff for participation might be worth the absolutely mind-numbing prospect of having to fill out yet another blessed profile first.
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