Weekly Buzz Viral campaigns & branded content

Social Media: A Fad or a Radical Change in Communication?

The first post this week will propose some debate. Some people will argue that social media is nothing more than a fad and it won’t endure. People with this opinion believe that sites like Facebook and Twitter will reach a critical point (or diminishing return) where so many people are using it, that there will be too great a mass, and where everyone is shouting all at once trying to get attention – which will ultimately result in no one being able to focus.

Opposite to this are the people who consider social media to be the most revolutionizing change in communication, ever. Devotees of this idea will argue that the world will never go back to the “old” and traditional media formats. They back this argument by stating that social media has become such a big part of our everyday life that it would be hard – almost impossible to give them up.

Representing the pro-social media side of this debate is this video giving you impressive and thought-provoking statistics about social media. Just to mention one of them; If Facebook was a nation it would be the world’s 3^rd largest behind China and India.

After receiving this amount of pro-social media information one could easily declare social media the greatest revolution. Wait just a tick. To differentiate our debate and give it some nuances we introduce an advert that – in our opinion – is quite simply brilliant. The concept is whether or not the future of publishing and printed media is in danger. Will all communication take place on the internet – and worst case scenario: communication will be as fragmented as Facebook status updates and short-lived links about the latest Lady Gaga outfits.

We are taking a rather objective role in this debate, and we will let you judge if social media is revolutionary or an overrated fad. However we must acknowledge that social media has a lot of our daily attention, and at this point it will be hard to imagine the same level of attention in publishing.  We disagree with people declaring printed media dead. Perhaps publishing will experience a renaissance – just like old LPs. It’s still cool to put on an LP record, and who knows perhaps someday it will be considered cool to have printing ink on your fingers?