When Chris Kenton was discussing Social Media a few days ago, he pointed out the literal meaning of media:
…the plural of medium, means “that which lies between things”. It’s “a substance through which a force acts or an effect is transmitted”.
If we look at the Web as a mechanism between us and the information we want, similar to print publications and telephones and talk shows and movie screens, the unique thing that stands out in my mind is its ability to rapidly provide relevant context. Using the Web we can publish or seek out more circumstances or facts that surround a particular piece of information whenever we want, as much as we want and as quickly as we can click, type, and upload.
The reason social media pundits often say customers are “smarter” these days isn’t so much because we can have conversations or be publishers as well as subscribers, it’s because we can now make highly informed decisions without much effort. Via the Web, most information we come across is easily put into a particular context and often times ends up being evaluated in contexts we hadn’t previously considered. This kind of activity was possible pre-Web of course but engaging in it used to be physically exhausting and time-consuming (interlibrary loan, meeting face-to-face in groups, scheduling appointments with experts, etc.). Now that we have the Web, not so much.
An anecdote in the U.S. government’s 1933 report, Recent social trends in the United States illustrates the results of shared but context-free information taken to the extreme:
If a sick person in Washington, D. C., turns to the classified telephone directory, he is faced with 19 closely printed columns of names under the heading “physicians and surgeons.” Clinics report that it is a relatively common experience for patients to state that they have come to the clinic, not because they could not afford to pay private rates, but because they did not know how to choose a qualified physician.
And in 1977’s The Social Impact of the Telephone, Suzanne Keller quoted Robert Theobold in the direction of the opposite extreme:
This society of tomorrow, according to many serious observers, will be a society of communications, moving information and images as we now move people and goods. “We are,” writes Robert Theobald, “moving from an order based on transportation and production to one based on communication, in which decisions and their results become simultaneous.”
The social medium we call the Web really is all about new conversation, the informal interchange of thoughts, but more important than any conversation is the subsequent ability to rapidly contextualize information to make our decisions and, if we choose, quickly contribute the results of our decisions for future use.
