Why the noise about Social Media?

Guardian technology correspondent Bobby Johnson wrote in his blog about why he’s finished with social media. He clearly is exasperated about the ‘hype’ surrounding the phenomenon and the last straw for him was how mashable declared Christian Bale’s tirade was a significant social media milestone because it was trending high on Twitter, blogs, and YouTube.

Ordinarily, I would tend to agree that such shallow content is a waste of bandwidth but the point isn’t the content per se. It’s the level of conversations about it that matters to those that are more perceptive.

The thing about Social Media is that its significance and how it is used varies from one set of people to another. The simplest way to class how there are various perspective is the behavior of generations.

• Generation Y (and those that come after it) immerse themselves in social media, using it as matter-of-factly as we all use the web and email today.
• Generation X is fascinated by the flow of information in a social media paradigm and seeks to understand how it works and how it challenges the way things have been done both from an anthropological, and economical perspective. Gen X also bears the burden of having to explain the whole darned thing to the generations that came before them.

The Christian Bale incident matters not because of the spectacle, but because there was such a high level of conversations about it. You can latch on to this in a number of ways. For example, I imagine that the producers of Terminator: Judgment Day would exploit the buzz to full economic potential.

The point is that social media is not just people talking about stuff. Social Media has become a measurable pulse, and the ones that can decipher it has a window into the internet’s subconscious.