The Most Human Developed Medium

In its broadest context, Social Media is not an invention of the past five years. Newsgroups, forums, Instant Messaging, email and bulletin boards have existed in various forms since the early 1970′s. By  early 2004 platforms such as Blogger, Typepad and WordPress came along and the need to know how to “code” melted away into the background.

As blogs arose into the wider human condition through traditional news media, so did the pundits and then came the “guru’s” and social media “experts” touting their expertise because they’d blogged a few times.

But then many voices joined that mob. Some hilarious, some idiot and some far more insightful and a few, very practical. I’ve always enjoyed Chris Brogan for his ability to draw people in and truly engage in discussion, Dan Zarella for his more methodical approach backed by credible science and Jeremiah Owyang for his networking and Sasha Halima for her witty insights. But there are many, many more. Hey, we’ve even joined the dialog over the past three years.

So in the spirit of theoretical thunking, it would seem that Social Media in it’s broadest sense truly is a medium developed by many, many voices. Perhaps more than ever before in the history of mankind. After all, just how many people can you fit in a cave to draw pictograms? And you can’t really carry a cave around and show people your work can you?

It’s this massive scalability that is most fascinating and the fact that anyone at anytime can add their thoughts and insights, as long as they have a computer or some form of device that enables connection and interaction with the Web. That’s quite astounding when you step back and think about it.

Social Media as a “medium” then, most certainly is evolved by the people for the people.