Is Social Media Selling Utopian Dreams?

Social networking is now more popular online than email and pornography. But while much of its growth is simply people connecting to friends or reading blogs to do their jobs better, an ideology about social media has taken root. And it’s flourishing largely by offering a utopic vision of the future.

So are social media evangelists closet utopians? I say yes. Is that a bad thing? Not if they’re right. But definitely if our desires cloud our ability to accurately judge what’s going on.

Let’s explore...

Ironically, the manifesto for what I’ll loosely term “social media ideology” is actually a manifesto: “The Clutrain Manifesto.” When it burst onto the scene in 1999, it was seen as a battle cry from the online masses gathering outside the walls of corporate America. Among its principles, "Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors," "Hyperlinks subvert authority," and "Companies need to realize their markets are laughing. At them." It set the tone for pretty much every book that followed on the topic, and by my study great influences the vast majority of its evangelists. (I confess to being one of them. My other blog is on B2B Social Media.)

In the 10 years since Cluetrain was published, it has shaped the perceptions of millions of net users and changed the course of the businesses that serve them. And it got a lot of things right, as the bottom lines of many a business can attest. In its 10th anniversary edition, the authors rightfully compare the book's effects to what "the Jungle did to meat packing, what Silent Spring did to chemicals..."

Why is its vision for the future so compelling? It makes six arguments:

1. What you think is normal isn’t. And it’s bad. Snips from the book (10th anniversary edition):

"People are sick to death of being valued only as potential buyers, as monetary grist for some modern-day satanic mill."

"Markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny, and often shocking."

"Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure..."

"However much we long for the Web is how much we hate our job."

"We long for more connection between what we do for a living and what we genuinely care about, for work that's more than clock-watching drudgery. We long for release from anonymity, to be seen as who we feel ourselves to be rather than as the sum of abstract metrics and parameters. We long to be part of a world that makes sense rather than accept the accidental alienation imposed by market forces too large to grasp, to even contemplate."

2. Identify a reason that’s in plain sight, but everyone misses. In Cluetrain’s estimation, it was the industrial age that enabled mass markets, then mass media, then mass marketing. Snips:

"mass production and mass media had totally transformed this relationship [between consumer and company], which came to be characterized by alienation and mystery."

"mass production, mass marketing, and mass media have constituted the Holy Trinity of American business for at least a hundred years."

3. There was a golden age and we can return to it. The most convincing visions of tomorrow re-define the past. This is particularly effective if you hearken back to a mythical golden age. In this case, asserting that’s all about the ancient bazaar. Snips:

“Five thousand years ago, the marketplace was the hub of civilization, a place to which traders returned from remote lands with exotic spices, silks, monkeys, parrots, jewels -- and fabulous stories."

"What if the real attraction of the internet is not its cutting-edge bells and whistles...instead, the attraction is an atavistic throwback to prehistoric fascination with telling tales?

"The triggering event, of course, is the advent of a global communication system that restores the banter of the bazaar, that tears down power structures and senseless bureaucracies, that puts everyone in touch with everyone."

4. There’s a savior/solution. The net, as it was referred to in 1999, and today more often as “social media.”

"the web is touching our most ancient of needs: to connect."

"Millions have flocked to the net...because it seemed to offer some intangible quality long missing in action from modern life. In sharp contrast to the alienation wrought by homogenized broadcast media, sterilized mass "culture," and the enforced anonymity of bureaucratic organizations, the Internet connected people to each other and provided a space in which the human voice would be rapidly rediscovered."

5. Appeals to eternal utopic ideals. What surprises many people is that as radically different as utopias can be, their deliverables have never changed. Never. I’m not just talking about Thomas More in the 1500s ancient, but works that go back to Hesiod's "Works and Days" 2,700 years ago. Here are a few:

Total transparency means no crime: "there are no secrets"
Freedom from authority: "Many of those drawn into this world find themselves exploring a freedom never before imagined."
Return to “natural” state: "imagine we were in a 'natural' marketplace-a real one in, say, an African village where one's 'brand was a matter of personal reputation."
A just society: "real authority is based on respect for knowledge"

6. Offers an idealized future. Cluetrain doesn’t get too specific in its predictions or prescriptive in what should happen, emphasizing more what will take us “there.”

"If we took as our goal the maximum flowering of culture, rather than protecting the interests of a tiny handful of producers and publishers, we could have a world full of music and creativity."

"the future business of businesses that have a future will be about subtle differences, not wholesale conformity; about diversity, not homogeneity; about breaking rules, not enforcing them; about pushing the envelope, not punching the clock; about invitation, not protection; about doing it first, not doing it right; about making it better, not making it perfect; about telling the truth, not spinning bigger lies; about turning people on, not 'packaging' them; and perhaps above all, about building convivial communities and knowledge ecologies, not leveraging demographic sectors."

"And when the thrill of hearing ourselves speak again wears off, we will begin to build a new world. That is what the web is for."

Ironically, the book even imagines a Q&A with a utopian:
"Utopians want to excite us about the future possibilities because they want policies that will keep the Internet an open field for bottom-up innovation. Dystopians want to warn us of the dangers of the Web so we can create policies and practices that will mitigate those dangers. Realists want to clear away false promises so people don't fritter away time on airy-fairy projects that will lead nowhere. Also, they'd like the blowhard utopians to just shut up for a while."

As a major Cluetrain fan, none of this should be taken as criticism. I’m just struck at how the same utopic patterns come up again and again. Also, that such works can have a huge influence on a society’s direction, particularly at times of instability. But by spotting these patterns, we can excise them to make sure we’re not short circuiting our analysis. And if the logic is perfectly sound? Well then, I’ll see you in the utopia group on Facebook.

What do you think? Is social media leading to utopia? Or are its utopic messages clouding our judgment?