I got up early this morning (5h15 am) so that I could go and frolic in that nice white fluffy powdery stuff called snow, falling down the steep sides of cliffs in a barely-controlled fashion. I love very much this activity, as you have to stay completely "in the present" to avoid doing significant damage to your face or various body parts.

Anyway, just before leaving I noticed a Twitter message posted by Eric Rice:

"social media makes me want to go back to liking the Old Way of Doing Things. Publisher-Consumer model." 

... and I replied on Twitter that I thought we'd see more of this.

I think we will see that there will be waves of activity, of significant change followed by retrenchment or push-back, and continued moves by mainstream media to contain or subsume "social media".

After all, we're humans, we've been social since we learned to make noise (and before, no doubt), and there's only so many ways you can say things.

Arguably aggregation and categorization and display in various UI formats is what many areas of social media are about these days, other than the permanent difference of connecting one individual to others, individually or as groups, on a continuum of publicly visible networks.

And yes, there have been some important changes to business logic and business models due to the interconnectedness of people. And yes, there are changes yet to come to governments and other organized activities with constituents and stakeholders who want and need information.

Oh, there will be lots more of "here comes everybody", but we may yet find that the next few years bring even more top-down control, of sorts with which we are not familiar yet ... less visible, more electronic and coded into systems and services, related to money, and / or more socially embedded in the codes that are replicated in integrated systems than we yet realize today.

As ever, we'll see. The big question, I suppose, is whether "we" are indeed THE second superpower, as Jim Moore of Harvard once wrote early in the bloggy Web 2.0 era (his expanded blog post now comprising a chapter of the online book Extreme Democracy)

As for me, I used to believe a lot more than I do today that "knowledge is power", At the moment, I believe more that "who controls information has power", but I also think that is more of a temporary thing than ever before.

Which is why I still think this phrase has meaning and will for a while: "A dynamic two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected technology and people".

Again, we'll see over the next ten or twenty years how things will shake out ... should be clearer by then. But a lot of people do not care so much about finding out more than what they are told.

I suspect that things will be more like they are today than they are not, except with a lot more to (try to) pay attention to, and a lot more people kinda / sorta angry with each other and probably themselves too, if they are honest.

Jon Husband
Wirearchy