Saturday 5th January

The headline in City AM, a free newspaper about business in London, is about Twitter being valued at 11bn dollars.  After the Facebook flotation fiasco one wonders who conjures up these figures, and just who will buy the shares.  And the wider questions about Social networking and what it might evolve into.  It is all so new, nobody had heard of Facebook or Twitter twenty years ago, and doubtless the social media we will be using in twenty years time nobody has heard of today.  And what will it all look like?  Will it still be as addictive or will we have grown up somewhat and learned to use it a tad more sparingly, not exposing ourselves quite so much, not re-tweeting gossip so unthinkingly, not replying so thoughtlessly?  Will it evolve indeed into something much more powerful, a real new media?  Or will the forces of Capitalism learn to control it and manipulate it for their own private gain?  At the moment I fail to see how either Facebook or Twitter can earn any real money, and from the other side of the blocks, how companies can really make it work for them.  It has certainly added cost as every company now feels compelled to have a web-site and a Facebook and Twitter feed, and there are new companies springing up to provide feedback as to how effective all this social media chatter really is.

Maybe I am just getting older, but my understanding of the thing is that the main reason people are using social media is that it is free.  And if it stops being free I doubt how many will continue to use it.  In the same way that certain people I know but do not condone are into downloading free music and films from dodgy websites, will now be very unwilling to start actually paying for content ever again, I think that social media and free on-line newspapers will die if we suddenly have to pay for them.  And I for one have never ever clicked on one of the Ads on the side bars.  I suppose that constantly seeing certain logos and names must stick in ones consciousness so maybe you are being subtly seduced into the advertisers world anyway, but it must be expensive, and about as cost-effective as leaflets through doors.

Anyway, I will continue to use Facebook and Twitter until something better comes along.  But I suspect that in twenty years time we will all have moved onto something else that makes today’s social media look antiquated; I just hope that it will be still be free and not another successful way of enslaving us both mentally and economically.