Evolving away from “the functional autism of supposedly interactive media”
May 4th, 2007 by Hugh Kennedy
I attended a couple of lectures at the Boston Public Library this past week, sponsored by the Boston Athenaeum, on the topic of the future of libraries. The question at hand: will the library continue to serve as the record-keeper for humanity? One of the lecturers, Tom Augst of NYU, noted that the critical nature of libraries is that they deliver the ‘felt experience of the humanity of culture,’ and do a much better job at socially gluing our communities together than ‘the functional autism of supposedly interactive media.’
The reference had me smiling to myself given the froth of buzz (or as one speaker nicely coined it, ‘these gurus as they bray’) about social and interactive media. For all its community-building properties, a lot of practitioners tend to operate alone, at arm’s length from the world, rolling over in bed at the crack of dawn and logging on, as Garrison Keillor noted recently, rather than traditional ‘old folks’ who actually venture outside for a newspaper and see the world. One of my favorite philosophy professors recently went as far as to chide our computer-bound set, via Kierkegaard, for not living authentically and in the real. Well, he mostly chided the press, but you can imagine how little the combination of the press and the public (or the dreaded “American People”) would appeal to Special K. Still, as social media becomes mainstream, and even our most conservative clients are asking how to play in the space, a few points are apt:
* Social media is not a thing, like a blog or a podcast: it’s a dynamic that is rapidly democratizing culture by driving openness and transparency. Read a few good blogs, even a few good corporate blogs, and you come away with the sense of having had a good conversation with an in-the-know acquaintance that gets your mind buzzing about possibilities. As we like to say to our corporate clients, you used to speak to the crowd. Now, you speak among the crowd.
* Social media is a not a replacement, but an extension. The traditional tools of brand-building and sales still stand, and in many cases are becoming even more innovative and interesting as they ‘break the proscenium.’ Social media gives you more options, more arrows in the quiver, which is a valuable thing when the official narrative of our culture has become so spun, prepackaged, expected and deadened.
* Social media compresses time, but also enriches it. Yes, the readout of culture in book form takes months to package, design, produce and promote. The gestation of great ideas takes time. But in corporate environments, where you often run on news cycles rather than seasonal ones, a quick response using a social media channel can allow you to tell your story straight — always preferrable to a journalist or citizen blogger who doesn’t know your space or products well enough to comment on them with necesary accuracy. (Perhaps he or she doesn’t know because you haven’t considered social media as a tool that might let them in on the grace notes they need to speak with accuracy…)
As communicators, the onus is on us to promote social media for the right reasons, to encourage our clients to convey what makes them unique in their own voices, and to truly communicate. If we do, ten or 20 years out, social media will have taken its place as a truly valuable medium, not just a tired, functionally autistic channel that once showed great promise.
