The year social media took charge

It doesn’t matter whether you care about social media or not – the companies driving it are very interested in you

‘YOU MAY not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

Leon Trotsky’s line should be taken on board by the dwindling band of politicians and commentators who think social media and new communications technology are some sort of passing fad that can be safely ignored. In fact, as 2010 showed, the long-established rules of media engagement are changing fast, driven by instantaneous mass communication on a scale unimaginable even a few years ago. As this year proved, if you’re not ready for it, you’ll get hurt.

Internationally, from Julian Assange to Mark Zuckerberg, the new stars of the show are those people who understand the power of data in all its forms, from classified State Department communications to banal information on the consumer preferences of hundreds of millions of individuals. As a result, we can expect in the years ahead to see major changes to national and international law, as issues of accountability, freedom of speech and data privacy become ever more important. In Ireland, though, with our hobbled Freedom of Information Act and a governing class that mouths meaningless platitudes about the “smart economy”, we are a long way behind the US, the UK and most of the rest of the EU when it comes to data openness.

On Tuesday, September 14th, as Brian Cowen stumbled and mumbled his way through a 13-minute interview on Morning Ireland, Twitter was already lighting up with derisive com- ments about his performance, the first sparks in a bush fire that showed how much the rules of media engagement are changing.

Fianna Fáil’s attempt in retrospect to blame Simon Coveney for starting that fire was an understandable political tactic, but showed how little they understood the new rules and the speed of reaction that those rules require. Because when Coveney wrote at 9.16am that the Taoiseach “sounded halfway between drunk and hungover”, he was stepping into a conversation that was already well under way.

Facebook is the biggest player by far in social media, with up to half of all Irish people now registered users. But it’s the immediacy of Twitter that is changing the rules of the game for traditional media, as for traditional politics.

In April, when broadcaster Miriam O’Callaghan inadvertently confirmed that rumours of the death of Gerry Ryan were true, she did so well before any official announcement from his family or employer. She was treating Twitter as many people do, as a glorified texting service. But Twitter and Facebook aren’t one-on-one communication tools like email or texting. They’re platforms for publishing content to the world. O’Callaghan had broken one of the cardinal rules of professional journalism and, by the time she deleted the post, it was too late. As the victims in the incident of the PriceWaterhouseCooper photographs discovered, one minute you’re the subject of an in-house communication, the next your picture’s splashed across the world wide web.

So does any of this matter very much? A regrettable but minor faux pas by a well-known broadcaster? A 24-hour frenzy over a slurred and groggy interview? Even a stupid prank by a bunch of intellectually challenged accountants? It’s been suggested with some justification that social networks lend themselves to a certain sort of digital narcissism, where no matter what the original story is, it always ends up being viewed through the prism of “what does this tell us about social networks?” True though this may be, it still doesn’t invalidate the central point that traditional intermediaries and gatekeepers are being supplanted by a new sort of media: more immediate, less reflective, more democratic, less responsible.

It wasn’t all about social media. The rise of smartphones is changing the way we live in many ways. If your phone knows where you are, where you’re going and (most chillingly) why you’re going there, then how does that change the way you lead your life? Smart- phones powered by Google’s Android operating system are fast passing out Apple’s iPhones around the world.

Add to that the phenomenal success of Apple’s iPad, which has sold more than 10 million since its launch at the start of the year. The tablet computer – a keyboardless slab of shiny glass and metal with a touchscreen interface – does not seem to have made as much of an immediate impact in recession-hit Ireland as in some other countries (early-adopter chic isn’t what it used to be here, unless you’re Minister for the Environment John Gormley, who’s been using his iPad for reading his speeches), but the iPad and its Android- driven competitors will undoubtedly make more of a mark in 2011, as we finally move away from the grey box on a desk to mobile, intuitive consumer devices.

In 2010 social media and mobile computing really started changing the way we interact with our friends, families and work colleagues, along with how we share and consume information and, increasingly, how we spend our money and do our business. In some cases these new devices and applications were simply replacing older technologies (in the Skype era, who needs telephone landlines any more?).

Meanwhile, as traditional businesses, including newspapers and the entertainment industry, continue their struggle to figure out this brave new world where nobody’s prepared to pay for their products, the new media giants, especially Facebook and Google, take all that data which you freely surrender through status updates, searches and the rest of their services. They analyse it, break it down and monetise through targeted advertising. They know exactly what their product is: you may not be interested in them, but they’re interested in you.