End of the Social Media Era : Human era begins : Triumph of Love

February 17th, 2011 -- The end of the “social media era” has finally arrived. Today. Who crowned me god of online media predictions...? The same guy who posted this tweet as of approximately 6:18am PST this morning, because that’s when it dawned on me...

Let me back up for a second. I awoke at 5am this morning with status updates and wild dreams in my head. Thoughts of the evolution of the “social web,” that f***ing scary fake fem-bot who FB friend requested me with “hi there I see that you like internet marketing, me too, let’s be friends” DENIED (hot real biochemical engineer lady at Stanford...ACCEPTED). A few minutes later, another status update popped in my head, demanding to be pushed out, and pushed out at a length of MORE THEN 140 characters no less... ? I had no choice but to obey. I knew of that clever new feature that’s been quietly added to Tweetdeck -- the seed of it’s own demise no doubt -- Deck.ly ... the ENTIRELY un-twitter-like platform extension that allows anyone to tweet anything as bloody long as they want it to be. Bastards! Clue number 1.

I rolled over and grabbed my little handheld cloud-synching device (aka "phone"), and loaded my Catch notes. Madly typing with my thumbs I flashed the ridiculousness of it all: thumbs pounding, clever brain synapses firing, Tweetdeck app-synching, feeding the cloud, sucking the feed...why hadn’t I realized this sooner?!

The beginning of the end

This has been a quiet topic of debate as long as shady marketers and “social media experts” started jumping on the bandwagon EN MASSE starting a couple years back (not unlike the endless “death of blogging” and now more hopeful #blogevol discussion).

“Social media” has always been a clever meme -- it was something you could name, it pulled us in, and suddenly the web was human. Suddenly we were all much closer then ever before, and the world had changed. We needed to name it. That’s what we do, we find names for things, because naming them gives us power over them.

If you jumped into the stream with little context or experience it was easy to buy into the hype. And with so many people jumping into the stream, a lot of clever entrepreneurs, businesses and copycats were figuring out how to turn a profit from the new social web, how to game it and effectively squeeze the life out of it. They squeezed a lot of life out of it, and often gave it even more, but they can never kill it -- because it’s immortal. Lives and breathes, and it breathes the same breath as the 5 billion mobile phone users that will soon also all be online and tethered to the cloud.

The future is here

In the not-too-distant future we will all have websites -- all of us with internet connections that is. Even if you don’t want one, there will be one for you (dozens of services now make available online all or most of your public record information, including income estimates, residences and family relations for little or no cost).

The barrier of entry is so low at this point, ANYONE can put together a nice-looking professional website in a matter of hours, at ZERO COST. Eventually the barrier of entry will become even lower, as websites will pretty much build themselves. We'll just tell the program, “I want my site to look like this one, but according to my own taste preferences which you’ve already memorized” -- SHAZAM -- instant website. This is kind of thing will be peanuts for computers, especially once they’ve reached levels of human intelligence and beyond.

For the early adopters, our websites will become our base stations, and travel with us wherever we go online, plugging in to our friend’s websites, and synching up information. There will be public and private layers of information available to those who visit our brain-hub online. We will be able to control the access to our brain-hub, and those who visit will know immediately whether they want to follow us or not, based on whether our interests and work synchs up.

Eventually, this information will synch directly to our minds -- we'll have a thought, click a button, and decide to send it to our brain-hub friends or not. At different points in the day, those who are synched up to our brain-hub will decided when to plug in and accept the download.

Laugh all you want. The beauty of all this is that even though it sounds like science fiction, it’s already happening, and you can buy the prototype mind-reading device which this will likely be based on for $299 now here (yep, the developer version is $500). Clue number 2.

The problem of technology

The great problem of technology is that it can neglect the biggest component of human evolution -- the heart. Computers need us to give them a soul. “Data transfers” direct from the heart are the most powerful element of human evolution possible, and you don’t need a freakin’ FB account to do it.

In fact, you don’t need any technology, and you don’t even need to meet in person, as heart transmissions can easily transcend the limitations of space and time. It’s just a matter of developing your intuition, connecting within yourself, opening your heart to the love you have for other human beings and humanity in itself. All the tools for developing superhuman intelligence are with you now.

What I’m seeing now is, despite all the blah-blah about privacy concerns, social media and the death of whatever’s hot now for communicating the fundamental aspect of existence -- that is, love and art which is the expression of love in all its forms -- the fundamental truth is we’re all becoming closer and ever more connected, we’re becoming stronger, we’re becoming more social, and ironically more human through our little cloud-synching devices and the various technologies we’ve created.

I recently made the mistake of calling it the “social web” in reviewing Gwen Bell and Ev Bogue’s new books -- call them 'Evbell' ;) -- for lack of a better description two days back. The end of Facebook is near (Douglas Rushkoff), Twitter is next. The internet is social, the internet is human, it’s life.

What we’re seeing now is the web is becoming ever more and more human. It’s no longer the “social web” -- it’s life. It’s the human web. It’s us. Together. Now. Standing for what we believe in, what we love and cherish above all, Life. Can we roll with this? Does technology stand in the way of humanity, or will we allow it to serve us...? Time for the “social media experts” to adapt or get a new job...?

SHARE, TALK, LINK, SUBSCRIBE, COMMUNICATE, THINK, ABOVE ALL: LOVE.

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