A Rising Tide Sinks All Boats: Why The Social Media Fishbowl Needs to Demand More from Itself

Social media is a bizarre medium.

In most forms of art and communication, the practitioners strive to excel.  They understand what constitutes success, and they work together — whether as collaborators, friendly rivals or fierce competitors — to reach ever-greater heights of creative, technological and financial achievement.

Yet, in social media, we’re mostly content to simply co-exist in an ever-widening fishbowl.  We all aspire to “something greater,” but few of us can honestly articulate what that something might actually be.

And so we swim in circles, trying to decide if the same peers we see every day are doing better or worse than we are, and no one’s ever willing to point out the obvious:

None of us are doing as well as we should be, because none of us are willing to insist on doing better.

If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say, Talk About Yourself

As a haven for narcissists, the only thing most “experts” are truly passionate about is themselves.  This makes it nearly impossible to offer anyone constructive criticism, because their chief export is almost always their own personal brand.

In addition, “we’re all in this together,” which also means we’re all in competition.  In terms of consulting, content creation and “personal branding,” this means your friend is your rival; helping them improve only hurts you in the end.

Doesn’t it?

Not exactly.

A Useful Thing I Learned in Art School

When I was a student at The Art Institute of Pittsburgh, my roommates and I shared a serendipitous bond: we were all incredibly driven to succeed.  As a result, we were continually competing with each other, not because there were a finite number of As or Bs to be earned but because each of us was capable of achieving those As and none of us wanted to be the one who didn’t.

We also had an agreement: if one of us noticed that another was slacking off, we promised to call him on it.  Sure, we might all be competing for the same jobs on graduation day, but we also realized that maintaining our collective momentum was the best way to ensure that each of us would keep pushing the envelope individually.

The way we saw it, if one of us succeeded, all of us succeeded.

Sounds like a winning formula, right?

So why hasn’t the social media fishbowl adopted a similar approach?

Everyone’s (Already) a Winner!

As always, I can’t speak for everyone in the fishbowl, but I do have a few guesses…

• We all have fragile egos.
• We’re afraid to rock the boat.
• We don’t want others to criticize us.
• Social media is overwhelmingly opinion-driven, which renders debate meaningless.
• None of us are ever sure if anything is really “better” or “worse” than anything else.
• “It’s just a hobby,” AKA, “If I have to think about it, it’s not fun.”

We’re part of a medium where bloggers continually offer generic advice on how others can get better at blogging, yet they rarely take the time to personally critique their peers and offer specific suggestions that could help someone improve directly.

Ditto for podcasters, marketers, SEO experts and other social media “gurus,” who are always more interested in befriending the influencers and burnishing their own reputations than in raising the bar of the industry as a whole.  With rare exception, the entire fishbowl can be boiled down to sycophants and the easily-impressed, and it makes me wonder…

Why?

Why on Earth would so many of us engage in a daily habit that consumes so much of our time, has so much potential for growth, introduces us to so many people, and yet never take the initiative to demand more from our peers?

How are we supposed to learn if we don’t teach?

How are we supposed to improve if we don’t admit we need to?

And there’s your answer.

More than anything else, I truly believe that our reluctance to engage in constructive criticism stems from the fact that, for most of us who practice social media, this is the first time we’ve been accepted so easily into a (nebulous) social grouping.  Once you’re “in,” it feels like we’re all one big happy family.

If so, why risk deflating the egos of your peers and being ostracized from the tribe?

Because a mediocre tribe is going to be defenseless against a predator with teeth.

Why We Can’t All Just Get Along

“Social media” isn’t new anymore.  It’s media.  It’s everywhere.  You’re on Twitter?  So is half of Hollywood.  Differentiate or die.

Six years ago, only the hipsters were on MySpace.  (Yes, MySpace).  Today, every brand you’ve ever heard of is on Facebook.  These tools you once thought were exclusive to self-important communicators like yourself are now being deployed by multinational corporations.

We’ve swirled around inside our social media fishbowl for nearly a decade now, ceaselessly debating ways to monetize, ways to compete, ways to collaborate, ways to hook the mainstream.  And in that time, despite TIME Magazine telling you that YOU were the most important person on the planet, you still haven’t cashed in.  You haven’t succeeded.  You haven’t escaped the fishbowl, and gone on to Do Things That Matter with these democratic tools that were supposed to level the playing field and give college kids the same means to change the world as corporations.

We had authenticity on our side.  We had individuality.  We had originality.  But we squandered it by not insisting that everyone do better.

With no gatekeepers, we had no one to impress.  We sought niches, which are really just hiding places for when the mainstream swims by.  We refused to adhere to a hierarchy, and those who assumed the mantles of mentors were reluctant to puncture the dreams of the people whose adulation made them tiny stars in a nascent universe.

So no one got better, because there was no one to dictate the terms of “better” and “best.”  No one improved, because there was no reason to.  And the mainstream never swept us away and turned us into household names because we’d burrowed too deep in our niches to be dislodged.

We’ve reached the point where both “old” and “new” media are insisting that we drop the “social” modifier and just call it what it is: media.

Now we all make media.

And that means you’re in direct competition with Viacom, Clear Channel and Disney.

The tide may finally have risen, and all boats may have been carried with it.  But, unfortunately, we never insisted on building larger, stronger, faster boats that could compete outside the fishbowl.  And now we’re swimming in a very different ocean.

The sharks have taken the bait, and the bait was you.

Is it too late to start demanding more?

Dig this blog? Subscribe and you’ll never miss a witty insight again.

Tags: Blogging, Business, common sense, expert, perception, Sociology