Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Social Media Enthnocentrism

"If you get it, share it," the tag-line for the Social Media Club pretty much outlines the information dissemination process. Learn and share.

It's no doubt more complicated than that. You follow, friend, listen, create, learn, engage, share, participate and more in social media. There are a whole slough of words that become a part of your social media vocabulary, once you've joined the club and started spreading the social media love.

The gospel is engagement. The gospel is community and conversation. But the gospel is for the most social of social media users. And I image that's not everyone.

We look at the steps of social media engagement, like it's a ladder to climb, something to reach the top of and conquer. It's an extension of the classic case of ethnocentrism that judges another culture without examining the biases of your own world view. Of course the social media-philes are going to run through all the steps of social media engagement--finding, following, joining, creating--and believe it's the best thing since slice bread (possibly skipping steps).

But all this evangelizing is making me crazy!

All those people out there reading in the silence are doing just fine. And I have to imagine that the majority of people out there on the web are reading, gathering information and learning, without commenting, re-tweeting, blogging, etc. And that's great! (Because if everyone out there in the world commented on everything after reading it, comments would become as noisy and meaningless as the lunchtime twitter-stream!)

Be where you are in social media. It's no better or worse than anyone else.