Sunday morning, January 8, 2012. At home, in front of my laptop, enjoying a leisurely breakfast with my wife. We have the TV on, to Meet the Press, which on this particular day featured a live political debate from New Hampshire featuring the top six Republican candidates.
The debate was branded the “NBC News / Facebook” debate. Ok, I get it, they’re trying to use social media as a mechanism for people to send in questions to the candidates. Even more so, they’re trying to create a forum for people to discuss the debate together (in this case, a forum called Facebook). Seems like a decent idea; after all, politics is something most people have an opinion about and creating a forum for folks to hear and be heard is an interesting idea.
I had the computer on, so I logged onto the debate website and immediately saw dozens of people weighing in with their comments about the debate and candidates. I started reading comments from my fellow citizens. Within 10 seconds, I read at least five comments that I wanted to comment on or reply to. After all, “social media” is about a two-way conversation and engaging in the discussion. Not just joining the discussion, but engaging in it. That is the essence of being social and social media itself, I thought.
I started to type a response to “Donald3422″. By the end of my first sentence, I realized that Donald3422′s comment was nowhere to be found on the page. It had disappeared to the second page of comments in a span of less than 30 seconds. You see, when people comment, the previous comment gets pushed down. So it is like a non-stop visual whirlwind, and every half-second comments move down.
I tried to respond to something two more times (I’m a glutton for punishment, I suppose), and the same thing happened. The sheer volume of comments consumed the medium in this case. I closed my browser window, told my wife I was going to take a shower, and left the discussion. Social media fail.
I started thinking: what would happen if I walked into the middle of Times Square on a Saturday afternoon and said something in a normal speaking voice out loud. No one would hear me. There would be no discussion. Hundreds of people would continue walking by me, and I would be left having a monologue with myself with no platform to communicate effectively. Even though I showed up in Times Square, this doesn’t necessarily make me a social person. I would actually have to have a conversation with someone, right? Just being there can’t be considered social (if I’m wrong, then my how low we’ve set the bar for ourselves).
I think in this example of a nationally televised debate, there are hundreds of thousands of people watching on TV and several thousand online “joining the discussion.” Yet, just the act of logging into Facebook and posting a comment about the debate doesn’t make it “social.” It might – in a few limited cases – provide a platform for one or two lucky people to send in a question that actually gets read during the debate. That is all fine and good. But I thought the beauty of this whole social media thing was to facilitate discussion and two-way communication. To listen and be heard.
It fails in this respect. I turned off my computer and walked away. I’m sure I was not alone in doing so. So the reality is: social media made me anti-social. The sheer volume of people was too much to have a meaningful interaction with anybody, and even on a terrific medium or communication platform like Facebook, it didn’t scale. It was a waste of time because it was decidedly one-way.
While I love and applaud what technology does, I believe social media is not a ubiquitous phrase that can be used as a catch-all term for any online communication activity like the one described above, because it simply isn’t true. Nor can it be a term used to simply describe an environment (online website) for people to congregate, because just showing up doesn’t make it “social”.
It makes it aggravating.
