September 16, 2008

What Will We Be When the Social Media Market Grows Up?

ME Liz Strauss wrote this at 7:20 am

Attention Is Not a New Idea

Creativity at Work

Thanks to everyone who participated in yesterday’s discussion of Creativity with a Capital C as described by the criteria set out by Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who also wrote Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. As I enjoy rereading this favorite in this new time, I hope you’ll stay with me.

Unlike instinct, learning must be acquired by every new person again and again. As a culture gains more information, individuals must pay more attention or focus in on narrower domains of study. As a culture gets more complex subdomains become too huge for one person to assimilate.The more mature the culture, the more it favors specialized knowledge.

Csikszentmihalyi points out that


Nobody knows who last Renaissance man really was, but sometime after Leonardo da Vinci it became impossible to learn enough about all of the arts and sciences to be an expert in more than a small fraction of them. Domains have split into subdomains, and a mathematician who has mastered algebra may not know much about number theory, combinatorix, topology — and vice versa. . . . now all of these special skills tend to be acquired by different people.

Therefore it follows that as culture evolves, specialized knowledge will be favored over generalized knowledge.

Consider three people — a community builder, an event planner, and a social media manager. The first two need to focus their attention on studying one thing. Their jobs are defined and somewhat narrow. The social media manager must study both of those areas plus many others.

We need to master a domain before we can innovate or create new ideas. As domains add more information, experts are forced deeper into narrower bits.

Mature markets form niches — it’s the natural evolution. Limited attention limits our options. To know anything well we must focus on less.

At the moment, the social media market is young and not well understood. Relatively little information is available. As more information is added to the common pool, it becomes less possible for one person to be fluent in all of it.

Do you see social media domain splitting? Are social networking sites becoming more specialized? What we will be when the social media market grows up?

I wonder.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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6 Comments to “What Will We Be When the Social Media Market Grows Up?”

  1. September 16th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
    isabella mori said

    i’m really thrilled that we’re both fans of good old dr. C. (actually, my first widely read post was one about him!)

    not entirely sure that this is true: “we need to master a domain before we can innovate or create new ideas.” perhaps it depends on what is meant by mastery. e.g. the beatles were not master musicians by any stretch of the imagination but there was something in the convergence of the group and in the cultural timing that truly made them change agents (hm, interesting: the difference between innovators and change agents. because they weren’t innovators, either)

    i don’t think that there is relatively little information available in the social media market. but because it is so young, as you say, maybe it’s that we don’t know how to make meaning of the information yet. it’s just a big pile of data and we don’t really have a clue how to sort out the socks yet.

    “do you see social media domain splitting? are social networking sites becoming more specialized?”

    absolutely. just one example: the vast majority of the facebook crowd is not very much involved in blogging (which i see as a social media domain; i know not everyone does; you do, though, don’t you?)

    “what we will be when the social media market grows up?”

    that is the big question. i have this hunch that 20 years from now we’ll laugh at the term “social media” because it has evolved into something much different. i bet virtual worlds, as vast numbers of virtual world gamers become influential, will take over. or am i reading too much SciFi?

  2. September 16th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
    ME Liz Strauss said

    Hi Isabella,
    I think it’s happening so much faster. As everything on the Internet moves — exponetially. I’m thinking that by next year folks will be feeling the pinch of having something on their business that is more defined than social media “generalist.”

    People will want a track record and track records require specifics. :)

  3. September 16th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
    David Taboada said

    What Will We Be When the Social Media Market Grows Up? Homo-Conexus.

  4. September 16th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
    David Taboada said

    What Will We Be When the Social Media Market Grows Up? Homo-Conexus-Sapiens.

  5. September 16th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
    Alexander M Zoltai said

    I’ve been pruning my “social media” involvement as I’m finding very little that’s truly Social going on.

    I agree with Isabella that blogging is social media and so is e-mail.

    All the hype going on by the “early adopters” and “A-list bloggers” and “Social network gurus” is not a flourishing of knowledge about social media; it’s a wild growth of opinion that’s choking the medium.

    Meta-knowledge and meta-methods need more appreciation. No matter how large the domain of knowledge in any area of life, meta-thinking can make it manageable. If, however, thinking is enlarged from the bottom-up, congestion and splitting of domains into niches occurs.

    Nothing wrong with specialization–we wouldn’t have eggs for breakfast or tea for dinner if there were no specialization. The crying need is for what might be termed “meta-thinkers”–like Leonardo da Vinci…

    ~ Alex from Our Evolution

  6. September 17th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
    Ari Herzog said

    Define “social media grows up.” If social media is in its infancy now, are you talking about puberty or adulthood?

    I like the analogy to culture, evolution, and specialization.

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