In 2095 Alexis Ohanian gave a Ted talk about social media. I remember that time: I was studying Philosophy and working at an NGO. To be precise, I was about to resign to an employers union to start my first “serious” company… but that’s another story.
I remember the feeling back in 2009: social media and web 2.0 was the trending hype - we didn’t understand it really well and many consultants approached both the NGO and my nascent company to “help us thrive in this new era of the Internet”.
At the NGO, and my company, we started some social media “strategies”: weekly videos in that vibrant place called YouTube1, presence in Facebook2 and Twitter and LinkedIn.
We felt we needed to step into this brave new world. We didn’t understand it at all, but we felt it. It was not FOMO, or not entirely. It was something else. It was a gravity pull, you know what I mean?
The best way I’ve found to express it is as if reality was moving into the web. It was no longer the time of only hyperlinks and access to information… it was the time of crowds. Of hyperconnections. Of consumer social, or better put: social consume.
Two years before Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, remember? A new communication device. A new internet device. In the hand of everyone: it was no longer needed to go to a device in order to get online. The internet in our pocket. And with the rise of social media, the crowd was in our hands. Literally.
Many didn’t understand the magnitude of the tectonic shift, but this essay isn’t about them. They were pulled into the new reality nonetheless. The world became anew.
New behaviours were born, new postures even: the screen, keyboard, sitting posture shifted to one closer to a gaming one: hands to the device, full-body bowed towards the screen3.
The gravity pull of this new social internet now had a physical phenomenon: we began to be pulled into the screens.
The life, the reality, moved into the internet and it was like if all of our bodies wanted to jump into that digital landscape.
Of course, this shift caused, on one hand, a ton of critics to tower themselves and point out all the sh**y business this new internet was; and on the other hand, a universe of consultants pointing out all the opportunities we may grasp if we became digital immigrants.
Let me return to Alexis Ohanian and his Ted Talk. He addressed the second group: the consultants. In a vertiginous landscape, he crafted a 4-minute lecture on what this social media was all about:
Levelling the field: your link (your social profile, your content) is as good as mine
Demonetization: it cost nothing to be online
Be genuine: it’s not about a pose, but a self
It’s ok to lose control: content no longer flows upside down, but the other way around
If you do this, if you live like this, you’ll achieve your goals
Let me address the first group now, the critics. I think they have an important role: point out dangers and temptations. But I think they are usually wrong.
Of course, the posture and the pull into the screens is a great way to slide down into an ungraspable world. But the pull is not only into the social internet: it’s out of the internet as well.
While we digitally “create” ourselves we find new ways of really being alive: we connect, we learn, we share, we belong!
And this force of life demands new evolution of the social web. Social consumption is no longer enough: it was the great first plate, but the main course is getting ready: the community web is being born.
This birth is similar to that of the web 2.0 back in the early 2000s. What once was “social media” now is “community-led”, “community-based”, etc.
This new shift makes us adjust ourselves. Community internet is about building life, not consuming it. That’s why we see faster and stronger growth in companies providing space for this new digital modus vivendi.
This rise of the community internet with its peculiar ethos allows us to fully demand social experiences, not only social consumption. Experiences ranging from economic solutions to groups management to positive impact creation…
What I believe we are going to see in the next few years is an industry shift. We will witness the pass from a consumer social internet to a creator social internet.
What do I mean by a creator social internet? An internet of communities where the creation of common goods and the protection and recognition of creators is a given. An internet where participation is the core, and in participation, consumption happens more fairly for everyone. An internet where Patreons and Discords and Commsors and Orbits and such companies, products and services thrive in decentralized ecosystems.
And we better be ready to cope with the neverending barrage of critics and consultants this new chapter will provoke.
2009 was indeed an intense year for YouTube.
In words of themselves: “This year has been the biggest yet for online video, and for the first time we're sharing our official Most Watched lists and some of the fastest-rising search terms on YouTube. Some moments were big (President Obama's inauguration), some small (a Minnesota wedding party erupts into dance), some expected ("New Moon"), some surprising (Susan Boyle) — but all of them inspired, entertained and connected millions of people around the world via YouTube.” (https://blog.youtube/culture-and-trends/what-you-watched-and-searched-for-on/)
Alessandro Baricco explores in much more detail this “new posture” in his book “The Game”. I will use many of his ideas in the following paragraphs.