Is Social Media on the Way Out?

The news over the past few years has been buzzing about social media. Whether it is people getting in trouble or losing their jobs over inappropriate pictures that they have posted on Facebook or the successful ways in which politicians have used Twitter and MySpace as part of their campaigns, we hear about social media and how it effects our daily lives. But to spite all of this buzz, or perhaps because of it, is social media on its way out?

This is the question that Matt Warman recently raised in his Telegraph article The Social Media Revolution is Going Nowhere. Citing some of the more recent and familiar incidents such as a recent social networking faux pas in which complaining about the boss on Facebook got a woman promptly fired from the job she said she hated so much when her boss, whom she had added on her Facebook list, saw the comments and responded with a prompt road to unemployment. Such cases, Warman says, are bringing to light the very public and perhaps even obtrusive nature of social media and networking that he thinks may be putting an end to the rise of social media.

So, is Warman on to something here? Is there enough of that stalker mentality hidden is us to make us want to know where people we hardly know are at at all times and what they are doing every minute of the day or are we growing tired of that endless stream of meaningless information? And does anyone even care if you are folding laundry or stuck in line at a grocery store buying milk? Warman points out a recent poll about Twitter, revealing that at least 40 percent of traffic on Twitter is nothing but pointless ramblings and inconsequential fluff. He also points out further statistics that show that nearly two-thirds of Twitter users end up quitting after only a month or less of signing up for the basic 140 character account.

So does that mean that Twitter was merely the latest version of social media’s Christmas toy? Is Twitter that must have thing that all of the parents fight for in the toy stores and department stores of the country, driven by the fact that providing this one hot toy of the season will validate your parenting abilities for the next year only to find that by the time the ball drops on New Year’s Eve that latest and greatest is lost in a pile of junk somewhere under your kid’s bed never to be played with again?

Twitter may be on the way out, or as Warman points out, once society catches up to the technology and learns how to incorporate it as part of our lives just as naturally as we do our microwaves or alarm clocks then perhaps social media will be a viable, and long term essential. I would argue, that perhaps the problem is not that social media has actually failed to do its job since it does connect people locally and around the globe. However, perhaps the problem lies not in social media’s ability to connect in a very public way that threatens to topple the empire of social networking but in the lack of quality in those connections. You may have 500 Facebook friends, but how many conversations have those connections lead to? How many leads is your network providing? Do we really need to know what 350 other people are doing 24 hours a day 7 days a week?

If social media is to survive it will have to learn to grow and evolve into something more than an overload of useless aps just as we will have to evolve with the technology. It is not a question or whether to utilize social media or not to use it, but how to use it better, smarter, and in more meaningful ways.