By K. A. Laity
There's a great passage in Marilyn French's The Women's Room where her character Val captures the rhapsodic joy of falling in love, then just as devastatingly describes the discovery of your beloved's clay feet—and the sinking feeling that accompanies that discovery. It seems like a lot of people are experiencing that crushing loss of rhapsodic love for social media.
Or at least that's what people keep forwarding to me. The other day a friend tweeted a forwarded link for Svetlana Gladkova's post, "Blog Day Today: What Real Bloggers Never Tell the World Truth about". Gladkova has something she wants to get off her chest: "And since I am not really a professional full-time blogger but still happen to know the industry after working in it for 3 years, I wanted to share with you some things that no real blogger will ever tell you the truth about."
It's a neat trick to both claim and eschew "real blogger" status. Gladkov's piece details these truths with an air of aggrieved sense of annoyance. Even if you listen to her insider tips, "chances are you will never get to know the truth as we invariably claim that we only think about trustworthiness of our sources and basically nothing else." The real bloggers are out there, but they're not being straight with the rest of us. How can we become real bloggers without knowing that secret handshake?!
Adam Kmiec strikes a more whiny but similarly aggrieved tone in his post, "The Social Ego System", where he quotes a cheery tweet by @briansolis about how social media is creating an "egosystem" which "champions free thought." This tweet caused a seismic rupture for Kmiec, who writes, "I find this fascinating, because the one single truth that 99% of people refuse to acknowledge is that social media has nothing to do with 'adding value,' 'conversations' or 'engagement'…What social media is all about though, is EGO."
Ah, the straw man! Yes, no one has ever commented on the ego factor in social media. The vitriol is so over the top, there has to more going on here than the sudden revelation that some people might be stroking their egos on-line. Kmiec's rhetoric is florid, filled with an exhortation to "Trust me" and disparaging "so-called leaders" and lamenting, "maybe my standards are too high." It feels like the realization that your best guy/gal is also dating other social media.
It's hard to resist wanting to break the sad truth: maybe social media's just not that into you…
While chatting about this phenomenon on Twitter (of course!) Social Media Breakfast-Tech Valley founder @amymengel tweeted, "I think the 'X sucks' phase is a natural reaction that happens when something starts to become mainstream & isnt special anymore."
Certainly that's a factor. But I think the main issue is part of a very capitalist outlook, which both Kmiec and Gladkova allude to: social media has not made them rich. They've tweeted cool stuff, gathered followers, left comments at others' blogs and still they are not rich and famous.
I'm sure in the early part of this century people thought 'this telephone thing is going to make me rich', thus saddling us with the horror of telemarketing. And the people who did make book deals or get corporate sponsorship for their blogs put dollar signs into the eyes of many a social mediaste. But the truth is the web has paid more often in whuffie than in cold hard cash.
Yes, we’d all like to be making a living off social media, but we also like all the free things we get from the web. These two facts do not fit well together. I don't know how things will shake out in the future. For me, the networking I've developed in my two decades on the web has paid off in a better job, friends around the world, publishing opportunities, travel and conference invitations, fellowships and more. My bank balance may not have grown much, but my life has.
Image via Signal Tribune Newspaper