The Changing Language of Social Media

I’ve been thinking a lot lately of how social media has changed and where it is going. I’ve written a lot about trends in recent posts and with my new book, I am thinking lots about it all started.

Among the places we have clearly and dramatically changed without anyone much noticing is our language. Social media has become the language of business. I’m fearful it may end up becoming the language of marketing an we will go full circle back to the days of the corporate “we,” and contrived images of employees of global corporations talking in perfect harmony as the march forth in lockstep.

Social media in business began with a good deal of informality. We were irreverent. Bloggers kidded each other. Sometimes it escalated into rip-roaring shouting matches. We used four-letter words and from time-to-time we used an adjective that rhymes with “ducking.”

There was an excitement and certain lack of polish. We got a lot of things wrong a lot of the time, but our conversations tweaked the story toward the truth.

I remember Dave Winer, one of the Pioneers who blazed a few paths the rest of us now follow. He often wrote how he enjoyed seeing typos in blogs because it revealed authenticity. It showed there was a real person there. My blogs often single draft efforts and I may lead the league in typos overall. But there are far few posts containing typos.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. But my concern is that the current trends toward polish, cross-editing, post-timing is eroding the spontaneity, candor and authenticity that has made blogs so special.

You see more of that on Twitter and Facebook, but you see less of it. Yesterday, I noticed an individual whose tweets I follow, start referring to himself as “we.” Then I noticed how many avatars had migrated to nice businesslike photos in recent times.

I suppose this had to happen.

In the beginning, we were just a band of unwashed guerrillas, striking with words, pictures and videos from out of the woods.  We might hurl an epitaph or two at the gates of empires, then we’d steal an occassional chicken and disappear into our day jobs.

Now we are inside those gates. We have been embraced and are being assimilated. We are becoming part of the process. We have become polite and we speak in a manner acceptable to family audiences.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. There is all sorts of evidence that we have humanized the enterprise and nudged government and even institutional religion toward listening and responding to constituents.

But I wonder if all our polite talk and confrontation aversion isn’t making the conversation a bit bland and not all that different from what it was before the revolution.