Marsh

Social media are imperfect by definition because they are social. They are complex and messy. Chaotic. Human. Media can’t be controlled, only served.

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”

- Marshall McLuhan

Just like authentic conversation, it is the intention and meaning that matter. Idiom, inflection, idiosyncrasies, imperfections, etc., and above all, ideas, compose and propel the richness and effectiveness of social media.

Remember, the mother of all individuated social media, email, was much maligned by people that did not want to use. It was because they could not type, had poor grammar, couldn’t spell and so forth. Fortunately, those constraints retired with the people that believed in them.

In today’s fast moving media ecologies intention trumps perfection every time.

Imagine if there was an expectation for perfect grammar, spelling and prose in the Twitter stream? Trust me, the last thing we want to read is some elegant Dickensian prose offered up as social media. It would not be fun or effective. However, it is fair to say that social media recalls and eerily channels the opening line of “A Tale.” 

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

 

- A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens
English novelist (1812 - 1870)

Social media, like conversation, are in the moment. There are plenty of other venues for formal prose.

Again, the main point here, and the key subtext, is that social media are plural, pluralistic, diverse, complex, compound, emergent, self-organized. Social media are not a singular concept, good or bad.

To wit, and tribute to Marshall, for social media, ‘The medium is the message.’