A month or so ago I was finally persuaded to join Facebook by a friend, who lured me in with talk about a ’99 projects’ group where everyone’s aim was to get 99 projects done in the year. I joined with a made-up name and only followed the closest and craftiest friends.
Yesterday I concluded that there was too little crafty inspiration and/or social interaction with those friends to justify the stuffing around you have to do to interact on Facebook. Pinterest provides far more inspiration and Twitter is much easier and quicker to interact within (though some recent changes have made it less intuitive).
That got me wondering… what happened to the ‘social’ in ‘social media’?
The answer is pretty obvious. There’s no profit in hosting a site that only lets people interact socially. These sites are about connecting people with people only so far as that helps connect them with products and services. Or rather, seeing how much advertising people will put up with, whether from companies or from friends ‘liking’ products and services, in order to keep up with their friends. For those who signed up early maybe it was good to begin with, then got worse slowly. Like raising the temperature of the water the frog is in, so to speak, without going too far and cooking the frog. You have to be in it early or it’s like jumping into boiling water.
Are there any social media sites where socialising is still the main function?
Ah. It all makes me miss the days when blogs were The Thing, before everyone started putting ads on their sites.
Facebook is getting increasingly weird/commercial. Have you tried instagram? It’s quite pleasantly simple and I see lots of creative people sharing what they are doing. I guess everyone has slightly (or vastly) different experiences on social media based on which networks they hook into.
Thanks for the suggestion, Olivia. So Instagram is more than just people taking photos with filters now? I’ve been thinking of re-signing up to Flickr, as a lot of the great embroidery pins I see on Pinterest lead back to there.
Ha! Well I’m sure there is still a lot of that. I’m fairly new to it, and mostly following people i already knew from other contacts lists, plus gradually adding various artists and creatives. I’m OLMA22 there. I don’t see too many filters (or #nofilter) in my stream. I avoided it for ages because I like photography and it was so geared to phone photos. But iphone photos are much better than they used to be, I figured out how to post SLR photos if I want to, and I realised it’s about communicating with images (as we do on our blogs too) and doesn’t always have to be about photography per se.
For art and crafty inspiration, people seem to love Pinterest though I don’t use it. Flickr I am only now coming to think of as social media, people do use it that way, but I’ve used it more as storage and a first base for my photos before they go to my blog or elsewhere. (Always hated the fact that Facebook et al own your content). I still rely on blogs for inspiration too, though they are often less interactive. Sorry for jamming up your comments, this probably should be an email!