captsolo weblog

The term “Social Media” (where “Media” suggests information publishing and consuming) may be the wrong name according to Doc Searls:

We are all authors of each other

One problem: I avoid using the term “social media". I don’t like it, and I don’t even want to know what it means. I may talk about blogging and podcasting and syndication and tagging and stuff like that. But I never think about any of those things as “media” and rarely visit their “social” nature (though I am sure they have one).

I don’t use the term “Web 2.0″ either. When asked a long time ago to define what it meant to me, I said it’s the name we’ll give to the next crash.

…

I don’t think of my what I do here as production of “information” that others “consume". Nor do I think of it as “one-to-many” or “many-to-many". I think of it as writing that will hopefully inform readers.

Informing is not the same as delivering information. Inform is derived from the verb to form. When you inform me, you form me. You enlarge that which makes me most human: what I know. I am, to some degree, authored by you.

What we call “authority” is the right we give others to author us, to enlarge us.

The human need to increase what we know, and to help each other do the same, is what the Net at its best is all about.

Is the term “Social Web” a more appropriate name?

Related:

“What is Wrong with Social Media?” - a summary of different points of view on Social Media collected by Brian Solis.