TecTrends Monitor

A column about coming Internet trends in Mashup magazine, by co-editor Ben Parr, brought me face to face with a curious paradox.

The coming Web will be media-centric, he suggests, with ‘text-based interactions’ dwindling. But, adds Parr, social media will be its largest component. When you go online in a few years, he says, ‘most of the time you spend will be to connect with your friends.’

It is easy to hum along and nod to either one, but do they quite go together? Sometimes, yes, and there is nothing new about that. Entertainment and socializing have gone together since we did them around the cave fire. Now we can just do it at a distance, and mobile.

But usually we end up doing one or the other. We get to talking and the music fades to background, or we sit back quietly to listen to the music.

Now that we can have gadgets that let us do both, of course we will want both. But there is still a subtle paradox. The social part of social media is basically about chatting, whether it is voice or text.

Sure, we can send videos back and forth, but someone will have to make the videos. Most of us can’t come up with that many clever things to do with our iPhone cameras. (Or, in the enterprise world, send each other enough PowerPoint presentations that are actually worth the time.)

So whether we immerse ourselves in media alone or with friends, when we do it we’ll be communing first and foremost with … content creators. Who, for quality content, will mostly have to be paid one way or another.

Tags: paradoxes

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 8:23 pm and is filed under Mobile Internet, New Media, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.