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I Am So Sick Of "Social"
via Why does everything suck? by Hank Williams on May 08, 2008
I have come to *loathe* the word social.
It has lost all meaning. Everything is friggin' social. Social meeedia they say.
Why not just be done with it and call email "social messaging" and instant messaging "instant socializing". How about "social walking" for when you walk down the street and say hello to people. "Social eating", for when you take a friend out to eat and are nice to the waiter. "Social sleeping", for when you go to bed with your wife or significant other, or, well with whoever. How about "social peeing", for when you (guys) go into a public bathroom and there is someone at the next urinal.
We use the term as though we are just so amazed that we can use the computer to actually *communicate* with people and/or share experiences. Well knock me over with a darned feather.
Now what *would* be amazing is actually figuring out a way to make some money out of all this "socializing". That would be a neat trick, since it seems even Facebook and Myspace are having a hard time with that -- at least on a revenue per user basis. And what is fascinating about it that we keep being told that it *will* make money. We are going to figure it out, etc.
I'm calling b.s. on that.
I don't think we are going to figure out a way to make significant dollars off of social *anything*. Yes the definition of significant is up for grabs. But for me it just means a major segment of the computing space. Like games. Or search. Or computers. Or enterprise software. Or like anything more than a financial footnote.
Indeed all this social may be a great public service. I personally love meeting and talking to my readers. And it may be fun to tweet, and message, and comment and such, but I don't think there are more that a few pennies per user per month in it. And for some services which get really really big, that will be fine. But it ain't no friggin' revolution -- financially anyway.
But anyway, enough about the money. That's a tangent (ironic isn't it). Can we please just stop calling everything social? Pretty please?
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