s****l m***a is dead, long live the web

I hate the word “s****l m***a”!

Alisa was right, It is just an iteration of what the web is at the moment. I am sick of using the word. All media is social anyway. Mr. Gillespie you were right. I am going to stop talking about it.

The web has always been social.

Gavin is not using the ‘B’ word for the next month. I am going to stop using the SM word for January. Wooters!

13 comments:

Stanley Johnson said...

What about S&M?

Much more interesting.

There are loads of websites and blogs dedicated to it.

Anonymous said...

You'd know Stan.

I too am so over Social Media Julian.

AKTIFMAG said...

What about M&M's?

Ben Shepherd said...

can i ask a question?

how come you're over the term? would be great to get some

Julian Cole said...

@Ben: get some what?

AKTIFMAG said...

@Julian

S&M

Wags said...

Enough of the S&M and M&Ms talk! ;)

Jules said: "The web has always been social."
I disagree... it is certainly social now, but it hasn't always been that way. Tim Berners-Lee intended it to be social when he "invented" it, but it was used primarily as a one-way medium for the first decade or so.

So yes, I agree that it's quite appropriate now to simply refer to the "web" instead of those "SM" words!

Kate Kendall said...

I agree Peter. ^ Not everything is social on the web today. No one connects with me when I'm checking bank balances? (Apart from scammers that is).

Perhaps we should have just stuck with the terms social networks and new media? ;-P

Ben Shepherd said...

i've been caught out ...

sorry, get some rationale as to why you've come out and said the term isn't to your liking.

mrG said...

a rose by any other name is still going to have the same properties, so what's the problem? Internet has NOT always been a media that results in open ripples through small closed pools, the best it had was mailing lists, which were not user-directed, they were moderator directed. See the difference?

First off, blogs are not a social medium, and I mean media in the sense that air is the medium for sound. blogs are just websites, forums, bulletin boards, no different than a COMPUSERV discussion room. One (or a few) talk, others listen, maybe comment, assholes are removed.

But Facebook, for example: Why DO people send each other icons for absurd gifts? Aye, there's the rub. There is also no one FB, there are thousands of sub-FB that only partially overlap, it is a media, a collection of omni-controlled (egalitarian, open no-moderator) pools that exist in the medium of the FB+apps waters.

Clearly FB and the many other like-systems are something very different, even if only on the evidence that of all my colleagues, none under the age of 40 really seem to "get" it, yet ALL those under 40 are in there constantly. Sure, maybe we don't want to call them "social media" but if you don't, you'll just have to call them something else.

Nudge Marketing said...

Isn't this just like what the music scene does with categorizing bands? I know people who would be offended if you called their style of music "punk rock" cause they class themselves as "melodic post punk" but if your trying to explain it to someone who isn't submerged in the genre you call it "punk rock" so they don't think its "country and western".

You can call it Graham for all I care, as long as both parties understand the term to be the same thing it makes little difference.

@ MrG - I'm an asshole but so far Julian hasn't removed me :)

mrG said...

precisely my point: you can call it Graham, or you can call it Social Media -- for a while I was partial to Artificial Social Networks because, in the early days of Ryze and Ecademy, it largely was. But what it is with Urkut/FB et al is a very different creature from marketeer schmooze sites that preceded them. FB grew out of a dating-site model, but giving the user more control.

So while Julian could remove you, he wouldn't, he would leave it to individual members to kill-file your handle themselves, and ultimately wait for you to either find your niche of like-minds and hit equalibrium, or simply remove yourself.

There's this guy circulating the schoolboards here in Ontario; he's a business supplies dealer who "did hours of research" and concluded FB is a nest of child preditors and bullies, and he's making $1200/hr (taxpayer money!) telling parents to keep their teens off it. So I asked my kids: they said, "Predators and bullies? gee, that sounds like High School!" only, they added, with FB you can tune them out; in the Real World (tm) they just lay in wait for you in isolated places. The difference is in who has the control.

That Julian doesn't see this as anything special may be a McLuhan axiom in action: Just as the fish cannot see the water, one cannot see their own environment.

Me, I'm siding with Mark Federman, that this strange and inexplicable phenomenon is evidence of something much deeper, and quite possibly a very powerful and transformative something.

Adam Ferrier said...

Why do people not like buzz words? And why do they feel obligated to stop using these words when they reach a degree of populatity - and importantly, common meaning.

Jules not all media is social.

Social media is a big part of what you and your company is becoming famous for - why bite the social media hand that's feeding you? Embrace it.