What makes me really weary about social media is the hype around them. In fact there is nothing to be so hysterical about. But the hype creates
a myth and a church to tap it. The social media church is a class of often arrogant funny people you meet in no-name agencies and consultancies and lecturing at webinars.
These people start with explaining you what the keyboard is for and ending up with pouring weirdest names of useless San Francisco-based networks invented by some unearthly geeks and gurus whose name you’ve never heard and will never hear again unless they some day, say tomorrow, are awarded with some fat prize.
Do social media create new information? It creates some additional space, not the content. Does it add a new value to information? Thanks to geeks and gurus now busy fragmenting the supply and the audience of myriads of not-talking-to-each-other platforms, the space barely retains its own value.
Even if they talk to each other, why would you need three or five reposting what you’ve already said on one? Does this make anyone’s life easier? Isn’t it so that the whole concept of adding a value is about making things easier, more available, intelligible, efficient? Just try to look at the crap some of them gurus offer as explanation why they at all created their babies.
Social media don’t even create a new fake reality. People have been sitting in the virtual reality for years by now. It only keeps them more deeply in this fake reality, in a pathetic hope they are making new friends, getting heard and respected. Nothing of that can replace true human relations and nothing of this can do the job of the professional media.
The church is simply doing its job. It taps its gung-ho victims. It invents new rituals, its lingo and mumbo jumbo, all for its own good.