I saw a Twitter tweet from Helen Overland (a.k.a. semlady) this morning about Denmark surpassing Canada as the country with the most Facebook members per capita. Apart from the very slightest jingoistic twinge at seeing my nation drop to number two at something (hey world, at least we still kick all your butts at junior hockey!) I was struck by a line in the article she linked to carrying the news.
The quote was from Rasmus Moller-Nielsen, CEO of Danish IT company Komfo, whose company ran a survey determining that a large proportion of Danish Facebook users were middle-aged or elderly. Moller-Nielsen stated “Facebook faces some challenges in Denmark. The older users demand greater quality of content.”
Now, I don’t have the context for this quote, but apart from the somewhat dubious suggestion that older users inherently demand higher quality content (I won’t go there) what stuck out for me was the idea of ‘content’ in Facebook. Moller-Nielsen seems to share the same disease as Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson. Anderson, as I noted here several months back, has said “the problem with the social-networking destinations like Facebook and MySpace is that they’re not about anything.”
These supposed experts should heed the words of Marshall McLuhan, who died nearly 25 years before the creation of Facebook. In speaking about the mass media of the day, McLuhan stated “the content is the audience.”
It’s an amazingly prescient statement. While the mass media most prominent in McLuhan’s time incorporated a one-to-many broadcast model, he understood that ultimately it was still up to each audience member to control their intake of that media, and to contextualize it in a way that made sense in their own world view.
Facebook and the like simply extend this natural capability that media in general (and the people who consume media) have. Social media explicitly take the one-to-many and make it many-to-many. The content of social environments is the same as the content of a house party, or a coffee shop. They are about you. In fact, ALL media have ALWAYS been about you — they are about what you choose to pay attention to how you make sense of it in your life.
McLuhan saw that half a century ago. Others are still figuring it out.
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Great analysis Jay… it’s hard to believe that so many Danes signed up for Facebook without enjoying the content at all. The primary content of most online networks is the potential to connect, and in this, facebook is King.
On the other hand, Marshall McLuhan also said “Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.”
Actually I’d say McLuhan was still right about that too!
Thanks Helen.
A more comprehensive view is this quote by McLuhan to J. Miller (his critic)
“All I am saying is that any product or innovation creates both service and disservice environments which reshape human attitudes. These service and disservice environments are always invisible until new environments have superseded them. When we met last year, you seemed to concur as a neurologist with the fact that inputs are never what we experience, since any input is always modified by the entire sensorium as well as by the cultural bias of the individual.”
Thanks for that Michael! Individual and cultural context are critical to consider, particularly in a world of ‘borderless’ communication. Truth, meaning and value are relative concepts, something many communicators (which really includes all of us at one time or another) loose sight of all to quickly.
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