Back in my callow youth, in 1996, I was reporting on an "online travel" technology conference for the Washington Post. It focused on the breathtaking development that the Internet would soon let people actually purchase airline tickets and hotel visits online, without a travel agent or even a phone call!
It was heady stuff during a period when Windows 95 was a bug-riddled juggernaut and connection speeds were measured in "baud." Brains were abuzz.
But I vividly recall one of the panelists saying something like this:
No offense to the conference organizers, but in five years there will be no "online travel." The Internet will be fully integrated into commercial transactions and the term "online travel business" won't mean anything different from "travel business."
I think of this often as it applies to social media. I think by the end of 2009 what we now call "social media" will start to become just "media."
The capacity for people to interact and collaborate with each other online-using social networks, instant message platforms, content sharing sites, ratings and recommendations tools, self-publishing communities and so forth-is becoming so commonplace that the concept of "social media" as a distinct entity soon will have lost its meaning. It'll just become part of what people mean when they say "media."
We're already getting close.
Just about every news site publishes blogs and allows reader comments. Surely the site visitors who use those features don't think of themselves as using a special kind of media with its own name. Having a Facebook and/or LinkedIn page is simply what web users do. Checking out a ratings and recommendations site to pick a restaurant or hotel has lost any feeling of exotic play at the leading edge. Online dating is simply one ubiquitous method of looking for partners, not a dangerous foray into geekland.
Facebook claims 140 million active users, and adding over half a million per month. [Squishy numbers, but still.]
Twitter is now on TV, Facebook supports candidates, candidates have Twitter profiles and any cause or business that isn't integrating some of this social media into their overall marketing/communications plans and internal processes is in danger of marginalization.
According to the authors of the seminal book Groundswell, in October 2008 only 25 percent of online users qualified as "inactives" [no engagement with social media] while the group considered "spectators" [who at least consume others' social media] was about 70 percent.
With the exception of Facebook, more complete and active engagement with the social media is still fairly low. But if the rate of adoption continues in 2009 as it did in 2008-especially if the government begins to carry out 2.0bama's plans for digital civic participation-one year from today the use of these "social media" will be largely integrated into a majority of folks' lives.
In which case we may find that-to bastardize media near-futurist Jay Rosen's manifesto on "the people formerly known as The Audience"-we may begin to think about "the media formerly known as 'social'."