Yesterday Tech Crunch’s Alexia posted an article entitled ‘I’d Rather Watch Instagram Than A Movie.‘ Highlighting how Hollywood is no doubt competing with what she described as ‘kill time’ startups. Fair point.

The post sparked a variety of interesting comments, some agreeing with Alexia’s argument and some against. I’m not going to debate the difference between Instagram or movies, because a person can spend their free time doing whatever they please. But from a society perspective, the mere fact that this kind of argument has legs is alarming.

The drugs don’t work, they just make you worse

Two years ago I wrote a post about how spoiled by technology we all are, with one excerpt being; “Technology can be just like a drug… Give someone a little taster and if they like it, they will want a little more.
Give them a lot more and they get addicted, they forget how they lived without it and begin to lose control.”

That was then, and this was one woman’s comment under the Tech Crunch article reaffirming my excerpt:

Hollywood aside, this fragmented behavior and loss of attention concerns me. I agree that the tech universe has found a way to entertain the masses. That said, social media can resolve to be a simple addiction rather than a habit with benefit.

Take heroin for example. It feels good…it numbs your serotonin receptors into submission. Without our understanding of heroin’s affect on the brain, we would all probably assume heroin was a great idea. But what about social media’s affect on the brain? What about the fact that most people can’t wait in line, have dinner, watch their wife give birth, etc without re-directing their attention to a group of mostly strangers?

Long term thinking is being affected by our constant diversions and short attention spans. So…go kill Hollywood if that’s your intention but try not killing your brain in the process. Do you think Plato could have written The Republic if he was constantly hounded by Twitter notifications? Social media has an amazing benefit but have we all forgotten the simple benefit of thinking in our own heads? If you can’t last 24 hours without your phone and social media, you’re an addict and as funny as that sounds, it’s not.

She’s right isn’t she? That comment was by Caroline Giegerich,a Huffington Post Blogger and Social Media Consultant.

A world in denial

So where does this all end up? In a world where residents of cities like London already live in fear of communication with strangers, afraid to make conversation while we commute and generally get extremely anxious about the unknown; how are we really moving into a better connected world? A world where we attend concerts, momentous events and amazing festivals only to experience them through the 4.5 inches held in our hands, exchanging the emotional excitement so that we can garner the attention from people we don’t even know. For what reason? Because we ‘crave’ the buzz and egotistical thrill of being in the spotlight. Still not addicted?

A moment of clarity

In the same comment thread, another user posted a link to a video of a poet known as Marshall ‘Soulful’ Jones performing a piece titled ‘Touchscreen’. Powerful, entertaining and though provoking. I have transcribed the video into words for all of you 140 character quoting whores.

Listen. Appreciate. Acknowledge. Think.

Introducing the new Apple iPerson complete with multi touch and volume control, doesn’t it feel good to touch, doesn’t it feel good to touch, doesn’t it feel good to touch.

My world is so digital, I have forgotten what that feels like.
It used to be hard to connect when friends formed cliques, but now it’s even more difficult to connect now that clicks form friends.

But who am I to judge…

I face Facebook more than books face me hoping to book face to faces, I update my status 420 space to prove Im still breathing; failure.
To do this daily means my whole web wide world would forget that I exist. But with 3000 friends online only 5 I can count in real life, why wouldn’t I spend more time in the world where there are more people that LIKE me. Wouldn’t you?

Here it doesn’t matter if I am an amateur person, as long as I have a pro-file, my smile is 50% genuine and 50% genuine-HD, you will need blu-rays to read the whites of my teeth, but im not that focused.

Ten tabs open, hoping, my problems can be resolved with a 1600 x 1700 revolution, this is a problem with this evolution, doubled over, we used to sit in tree tops, till we swung down and stand up right, then someone slipped a disc, now we’re doubled over at desktops.

From the Garden of Eden, to the branches of Macintosh, Apple picking has always come at a great cost.
iPod, iMac, iPhone, iChat, I can do all of these things without making iContact.

We used to sprint to pick and store Blackberries, now we run to the Sprint store to pick Blackberrys, it’s scary.
I can’t hear the sound of mother nature speaking, over all that Tweeting, and along with it is our ability to feel as it’s fleeting.

You would think these headphone jacks inject in the flesh the way we connect, the disconnect, power ON. So we are powerless, they got us love drugged. Like e-pills, so we e-trade, e-mail, e-motion like e-commerce because now money can buy love, for 9.95 a month – click!

To proceed to checkout – click! To X out where our hearts once were – click!
I’ve uploaded this hug, I hope she gets it – click!
I’m making love to wife, I hope she’s logged in – click!
I’m holding my daughter over a Skype conference call while shes crying in the crib in the next room – click!

So when my phone goes off in my hip, I touch and I touch and I touch, because in a world where there are voices that are only read and laughter is never heard or I’m so desperate to feel that I hope the technologic in reverse the universes so the screen can touch me back, and maybe it will, when our technology is advance enough to make us human again.

As it has expanded in size, recruiting more and more writers from different journalistic backgrounds, it has made a transition into wider areas of Digital Technology where the competition is greater and the audience is larger.

Formally known as ‘The Social Media Guide’… Now that the slogan is no longer present on the site, what kind of site are Mashable now?

The Opportunity

Cashmore can see the opportunity with the amount of press and traffic his site receives daily. Therefore, maybe it should be leaping into reporting on all things digital/technical.
But could this transition be more of an innovative move by Cashmore; knowing that Social Media is losing the ‘what is social media’ factor that made his baby ever so popular in the first place?

Facebook recently achieved a landmark milestone in digital history, by reaching 500 million users. Funny, considering it was only a year ago that we were still trying to prove that Social Media wasn’t a fad.

The Transition

Mashable’s new 2010 re-design has dropped the tagline ‘The Social Media Guide’ and opened up it’s news wings to expand into all areas of digital technology.
It had been reporting on most new technology news since launch but had always put a social media spin on it.
Only recently, has it decided to devote a large portion of it’s articles to technology without the social fluff.

With all businesses, as you expand into other areas, you face more and more competition. Where you may dominate your specific niche (in this case Social Media); if you decide to focus on multiple areas, such as Web Technology, Mobile and Business for example, you will find yourself not only taking away the USP of your site, but also confusing your core market (which in this case im not too sure what that is for Mashable).

The Stats Never Lie

I tweeted about this exact topic recently and the response i received was interesting. A few replies highlighted that while the engagement on Mashable is low in comparison with their ‘share factor’, the point was raised that most people would rather share an article and discuss with their own network than comment directly within the article itself.

I guess that makes sense, and no-one can argue with their analytics, as it’s plain to see that Mashable receive some pretty dominating numbers.

However, as the place to visit for all new media information, wouldn’t you expect at least 0.01% of their 3 million daily page views to translate into more than their average of 16 comments per post?

Each of Mashable’s articles receive the best part of 1000 Twitter Retweets and the Facebook share’s are somewhat lower. For every 1000+ shares, we see an average of 16 comments, which to me indicates, that while we love to recycle content and share knowledge with our networks (for whatever ego boosting illusion of intelligence we want to create), as ‘Social Medium’s', we chose to not pay much attention to the source.

Sharing Doesn’t Always Mean Caring

I’d love to investigate into this further and really challenge the concept of sharing articles and how does it really coincide with the definitive definitions of Social Media (if there is a definitive) or at least acknowledge that sharing doesn’t always go hand in hand with ‘engagement and interaction’.

If the King Kong site of Social Media is happy to knock out relentless articles daily and keep it’s followers sharing the content, but not directly engaging; in my opinion (and that’s all this is) Mashable is losing a severe amount of brand equity, as the amount of time their average reader actually spends on the site would be minimal.

The Reality

Mashable is a force, that is obvious. It’s writers know their stuff and while some of their articles are completely pointless the majority are informative and relevant.

But ask yourself this; when you visit Mashable what do you expect to find?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but do we really want to visit Mashable and see the same iPhone article that can be found on Tech Crunch, Engadget or Gizmodo?

Do we want to find Money and Finance information that we could see more comprehensively on Money Saving Expert? Do we want to watch the latest movie trailers in their Entertainment section?

Mashable is the site that made Social Media easy for people to understand and keep track of as it grew and grew.

Personally, while it’s great to be ‘that one site’ that tries to report on EVERYTHING going on in new media, at the same time, there is a huge area of confusion for the consumer.

Pete Cashmore explains in his interviews that Mashable started as a ‘mash-up’ of content on the Internet. Yet it’s tagline was Social Media and it became famous for being the Social Media Guide, not for being a source of all things digital.

I doubt Mashable will care whether it’s network interact on their website or share the content without thinking. As a business they are successful and no doubt their traffic brings ridiculous revenue; but it’s only a matter of time before the masses realise Mashable’s content isn’t as revolutionary as it used to be and people will get bored of retweeting the same recycled content.

Note:

If you are one of the thousands of people that Retweet Mashable’s article’s but don’t have an opinion.
Please stop. The whole world of Twitter is following Mashable and we all see their feed.
At least be creative and voice an opinion for sharing.

I was given pretty much a blank canvas for a topic, but had to relate it to Gumtree of course.
So being the uber geek that i am, you can pretty much guess what i wrote about.

Here is a short excerpt:

“Luca Massaro, a tech blogger and digital marketing consultant from London, tells us how he posted a Wanted ad on Gumtree to find some of his prized possessions at a bargain price.“

You can read the full article here – Geek For Gumtree.

However, when Apple launched the iPod on October 21, 2001, it was such a huge success that it only took a couple of years for most people to simply start using the name “iPod” whenever they referred to an MP3 player.

Apple had sold 125,000 iPods by the end of 2001; it sold a flabbergasting 225 million by 2010.
Coupled with the music management/online music store one-two punch that was iTunes, the iPod turned out to be one of the most successful gadgets of all time.

In the amazing infographic after the jump, you can see the rise of the iPod and iTunes and how they’ve affected our lives over the last nine years.

It’s true: The rest of the MP3 market never stood a chance.

Spotted at Mashable