This is cover slide of my presentation (in case of interest, the full pdf can be found on SlideShare – So called ‘Social Media’ – What do we do with it? What does it do with us? ) I made in Tallinn last week, at the spring gathering of the InterDirect Network. I was invited by the group to talk about the possible futures of the ‘Social Media’, and what it may mean for the DM (=’direct marketing’) industry (although as I learned, the industry is currently repositioning itself into a ‘dialogue management’ one).
But before talking ‘the futures’ I made a tour into the relatively distant past, bringing transformational approach of McLuhan into the conversation: the tools change us, and different us create another culture.
It was not, therefore, a usual story about millions of users, billions of clicks and quadrillions of connections (at least it was not only about that – you can’t entirely escape the quadrillions). Instead, I tried to talk about the impact these new media have already made on us, and what are possible societal and cultural shifts that are brewing as a result. The picture below is a short summary of the four major qualities I presented (they also group into two large themes, Omnipotent Me and Stigmergic System. I was worrying that this might be too high-brow and abstract for these very pragmatic folks, but no, the talk was apparently very well received (albeit called ‘overwhelming’).
Playing with the futures, and pasts 