Leo Laporte and the end of social media
August 25th, 2010 by Tim Greenhalgh
One of the more visible social media professionals has decided to disengage, citing the pointlessness of the platforms. Is this the beginning of the end of ‘social media’?
Leo Laporte, the influential broadcaster behind the TWiT network of podcasts has posted a heartfelt blog in which he reasons that all social media is roughly the equivalent of talking to the wind.
The agent of change was his discovery that a glitch with Google Buzz – a social platform he has championed - meant that everything he had posted there for over two weeks hadn’t been seen by anyone. Worse still, no-one noticed.
Is Leo right? Are we all, effectively, talking to nobody when we engage online?
It often feels like that – but we have no real idea about who we have connected with through our ideas, unless we have engaged directly.
The power of social networks really lies in their universality and commonness. If you wanted an analogy, you could say that social networks allow millions of people to ‘overhear’ conversations in the way that we listen and learn from people talking on the train, the Tube, in cafes, restaurants and pubs.
This information is often of no immediate use, might be flippant, irritating or noisome but it’s also often very beneficial. It might colour our days, make something more understandable, or simply give us pause for thought.
More than that, the sharing of information, directly or indirectly, informs and celebrates the way we live. We like to share because it is a benefit. If no-one is listening, if the chatter machine has broken down temporarily (ie the pub had to shut its doors for a while) then definitely we lose an outlet for our egos.
But it does not mean that being social has no purpose and I think maybe it’s the reverse. It reminds us that we’re not special, individual or separate and we need to share together.
Tags: buzz kill, Leo Laporte, podcasts, social networks, TWiT
August 25th, 2010 at 3:55 pm
It strikes me that Leo is over-reacting somewhat.
There are probably a handful of people on the web whose every utterance is awaited with eagerness. There are many millions more whose output will fall somewhere in between “interesting” and “thoroughly disposable”.
And not everything the leading bloggers/Twitterati have to say is necessarily memorable. It’s a tough task to be wonderfully insightful with every keystroke.
But, amid, all the cacophony, there’s a chance you might be heard by someone who is taken by what you have to say. Crying over Google Buzz seems a bit much…
August 25th, 2010 at 4:32 pm
Agreed, Jon and thanks very much for the thoughts. I think that if you can touch 2 or 3 people in a day online, you’re doing very well. How will people, who do not know Leo, connect with him if he does not at least announce his latest ideas (always welcome) on social media networks? It seems self-defeating, in every sense. By the way, talking about expression of ideas, have you seen the talk by David McCandless (TED Global, Oxford) that has just been posted on the web? Worth a look.http://bit.ly/9GLv42