A response to Spencer Fry of Carbonmade, who recently posted a blog entry entitled: “Down With Social–Social is Immeasurable and a Waste of Time.”

Spencer, I agree to this extent:  The phrase ‘Social Media’ is so amorphous as to be essentially meaningless.  In fact, all media are social.  It’s like saying Wooden Tree, or Feathered Bird.

The most social medium is sexual intimacy, followed (if we’re talking relevance; preceded if we’re talking chronology) by meaningful face-to-face conversations, scaling out from there, and eventually reaching the nebulous netherworld of thoughtless Likes, meaningless Tweets and snarky YouTube comments.  Noise.  Cosmetic data with no emotional or meta resonance.

What’s usually ignored in conversations about Social Media platforms is the Science of Narrative.  Narrative is the force that makes media meaningful.  Narrative may not make the world go round, but it describes for us why and how it does.  It provides context for information that would otherwise appear as random.  The reason social messaging echos and evaporates is that it’s not connecting with a narrative.  (A hashtag or a mention does not a narrative make!)

The most relevant aspect of Social Media will turn out to be the lens it afford us with which to perceive narratives.  We are, I believe, at a stage in the history of narratology that parallels where physics was at the turn of the last century, when the science moved from the Newtonian to the Quantum.

Marketers who use social media as you have described it, as a fashion statement, are doomed to keep firing blanks at a target they cannot see.  They are using Industrial Aged models to engage in a Networked environment.  It’s like trying to split an atom with a pendulum.

Those who use it as a lens on narrative, will be able to direct ‘particles of meaning’ at the quantum narrative made visible by social technologies and capture the massive energy predictably released by these interactions.