Can There Ever be “Too Many Notes?”
Is social media a wild-and-wooly (yet ultimately self-governing) marketplace of ideas? Or, can there ever be “too much” discussion of anything…including social media itself?
A proliferation of recent articles, blog posts and other communications seem to advance the idea that “There’s too much talk about ______ ,” wherein ______ is the particular technology, brand, personality or pop culture obsession du jour the individual opining personally finds most annoying.
While there’s no doubt that such statements frequently reflect a well-founded concern about reflexive groupthink, they’re also inherently problematical. Why? Because the quality and quantity of the content people create may speak volumes about them as individuals and perhaps society, but has nothing to do with social media itself. Is this blindingly obvious, or is there a greater insight to be gained here?
Marshall McCluhan’s gone. May he rest in peace. Now, the message is the medium, not the other way around. Blogs, Twitter streams, wiki entries, Facebook pages and FriendFeeds are simply a speculum vitae, a mirror of life that reflects what millions of people, in millions of places, are thinking about at any given point in time. No more, no less.
A Shopping Spree in the Marketplace of Ideas
In the ancient world, the Agora was the public marketplace in which all manner of goods and services were exchanged, and social contracts made. In the landmark 1990’s work, The Cluetrain Manifesto, a radical, new idea emerged: Markets are Conversations.
So, if conversations between free people are the new marketplaces — the agora of ideas, if you will, then –by definition– there can never be “too much” or “too little” discussion of Barack Obama, Britney Spears, theoretical physics, standard poodles, noodle kugel or anything else.
Rather, there’s exactly as much as the conversational marketplace wants there to be, regardless of whether you, I, or any other individual is interested in any given topic at any given point in time.
That’s the very nature of public discourse in a free society. Right now, there are millions of online conversations going on, ranging from the inspired to the inane, the generic to the stupefyingly specific, and all stops in between.
So, pick one. Or several. You’ll find the conversations that are right for you. You pays your money (or not, in most cases) and you takes your choice.
That’s the beauty of the human interaction that’s enabled by social media tools and technologies.
Conversations Just Want to be Free
So, can there ever be “too much” discussion of anything, then? The answer lies in the classic confrontation scene between the Emperor Joseph II and Mozart in the film and stageplay Amadeus
If conversations are the social “music” of free peoples, then, no, there can never be “too many notes.” There are as “just as many as are required.”
Besides, if someone’s going to just “cut a few” notes, the question then arises: Who’s going to do the cutting…and just which ones did you have in mind?
January 22nd, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Why is the message the medium? Because it's the reverse of the other? If one of the purposes of the new world is to change the mindset, then might a different "quote" be in order?
There can never be too many notes but I would get a headache very quickly if only one note is played, albeit variations on tone. When Meg Fowler tweeted last night challenging people to not blog about Twitter in February, I leaped and accepted.
It may not be the answer you're looking for, but when you talk about the Agora, I think of virtual public spaces and wax philosophical.
January 22nd, 2009 at 9:59 pm
Ahh, but like I commented to Peter Kim's post there, who are the members of the echo chamber? Who are the listeners of the notes? You and me? Or your mother and my mother? Or all of the above? Should the message be different for the audience? I don't think so…
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:07 am
Those of us who live and breathe social media sure do love talking to each other about it. I long for the day when we all stop talking about "Social Media." That will be the day that online communication channels e.g. Twitter, blogs, forums, etc. will have become as ubiquitous as a spoken conversation; it will no longer be a novelty, just another form of communication.
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:49 am
Great post Michael! Congrats on implementing Intense Debate btw…
January 22nd, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Ari, thanks. I say "the message is the medium" precisely because social media is – or certainly should be – about ideas rather than the stuff used to convey them. I ask (rhetorically) if that isn't blindingly obvious, but I'm honestly not certain that it is for many people – not because they aren't smart – they are. They're just approaching the question from a different mindset, I think.
Simply put, "the message is the medium" is the reverse of the tail-wagging-the-dog model McLuhan (accurately, I think) described in the 60's. Fortunately, now isn't then, and we're no longer living in the interruption-based, one-to-many communications world of Mad Men. (We sure like watching them on TV, though.)
Re the "One note" idea, I'm tempted to do a follow-up post on what Peter Kim wittily dubbed the "lazysphere" – i.e., otherwise bright, capable folks all talking to one another about the same stuff in the same way. I think that's what probably inspired Hubspot's hilarious "Social Media Marketing Madness" cartoon. http://tr.im/btlb
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:27 am
Scott, I think you've nailed it. To paraphrase Clay Shirky, the impact of communications doesn't get socially interesting until the underlying technology gets boring …and everybody's got it — i.e., the ubiquity you describe. For now, I think we're still waiting for the novelty of much this stuff to wear off. I, for one, admit I'm enjoying the wait
January 25th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
i think you are right, that there can never be enough discussion, but we need tools and filters to sort through the noise to find the signal
January 26th, 2009 at 2:18 am
Thanks, Fred. Sounds like a great VC investment opportunity to me.
Likewise, I agree that getting the S/N ratio in line is essential to deriving value from these exchanges. Tools that help find the right conversations will help make usage of (all forms of) social media even more ubiquitous, and thereby of greater valuable. (That might seem like a paradox, but isn’t.)
Emerging semantic approaches may be the key here, I think.
January 28th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
McLuhan also believed that as each new technology/medium is adopted, it evolves humankind. Each medium becomes an extension of ourselves. When social media becomes just another extension of ourselves, the discussion surrounding it will cease and we will have been evolved. Until then, I agree with you, Michael, that there will be as many notes as required.
Re: filters… we evolve filters, too. It's part of the process. Does anyone really watch commercials anymore the way we used to? Only Superbowl ads 'cos they're inventive sometimes.
January 29th, 2009 at 4:05 am
Thanks. You've inspired me to do some further reading/research on McLuhan, who was extraordinarily insightful and on-target in his time. (As a Canadian, you knew that, of course.)
Rather, my point was that there's still a fundamental misapprehension in some quarters of what social media's all about. You see this when legacy organizations decide to "do one of those blog things," or when elected officials make risible public statements about Internet "tubes," and the like.
Re TV advertising: Attention is the new ROI. I'll be watching for trends with this year's crop of Superbowl commercials. Of course, being a Pennsylvanian, I'll be watching I'll be watching the game, as well. ;^/
January 29th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Try this link again:
http://tinyurl.com/35ndh
January 29th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
McLuhan was actually one of my least favourite media analysts to read in school… he gets pretty convoluted at times, and like any good philosopher, contradicts himself without remorse. But he did have some clever aphorisms that force people to think about things in interesting ways
I'm a Cluetrain Manifesto fan… I think any organization that wants to get into social media should read that first. There are too many organizations misusing social media – or calling it social media when it's really one-way communication, or maybe can be classified as multimedia. I think we're still in what Everett Rogers called the "early adopter" stage, where people are just starting to grasp social media, but it's about to hit the majority (nice little explanation of that here: http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_rogers_innov...target=”_blank”>http://So” target=”_blank”>http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_rogers_innov...Sonaturally I think there will be some experimentation and misuse… and lots of conversation, too, which is a good thing. Discussion and discussion about discussions will help shape its mainstream use.
BTW, Go Steelers! Trying to find a good pub with a large screen TV to watch it here in Toronto.
February 6th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Unstructured content (which includes social media) is increasing exponentially. Analytics/reporting is key to reveal/track/correlate emergent signals. I'm proud to say that Telligent has invested early to tackle this (huge) problem. You can read more about what we're doing on my blog: http://communityzenmaster.com/blogs/lliu/archive/...