Circumlocutions

ear World,

Social Media.
Social.
Media.
   Why do these two words con­fuse the hell out of so many peo­ple? I don’t just mean con­fuse in the whim­si­cal way your par­ents might be con­fused about how to open a file in an email. I mean con­fused — to the point where peo­ple end up doing things com­pletely bass-ackwards and screw­ing them­selves over.

   Yes­ter­day, Scott Green­field and Brian Tan­nebaum posted excel­lent, some­what related and extra­or­di­nar­ily rel­e­vant state­ments regard­ing the need for lawyers to sub­scribe to and fol­low an eth­i­cal guide­line. The over­lap between them lies in a lawyer’s online pres­ence, and since I am so obvi­ously steeped in online real­ity that I instantly asso­ci­ated those verbs as online col­lo­qui­alisms (“sub­scribe” to a feed and “fol­low” on twit­ter) I will focus mainly on the online aspect of the issue.

   Which brings me back to Social Media. How com­pli­cated can it be? Why are there Social Media Gurus for hire, who obvi­ously are cer­ti­fied via Social Media Cer­tifi­cate pro­grams? How on Earth can some­thing that is based on the most nat­ural activ­ity in the world — talk­ing to some­one — become so over­whelm­ing that peo­ple feel the need to pay for peo­ple to do it for them? Net­work­ing existed for cen­turies, long before Social Media came around. Is it the “Media” that’s throw­ing peo­ple off? Do peo­ple feel like they need to fol­low some­one else’s instruc­tions or out­source their online pres­ence because they don’t feel com­fort­able deal­ing with media?
   Because it’s not media. It’s online net­work­ing. It’s like walk­ing into a room full of peo­ple, except it’s online. There is noth­ing mys­ti­cal or con­fus­ing or dif­fi­cult about this con­cept.
Peo­ple didn’t have a prob­lem under­stand­ing chat rooms; but as soon as it has a Title peo­ple drop every­thing they might have known about social inter­ac­tion online.

   My per­sonal opin­ion is that Social Media is a straw man. Yes, it is miss­ing a brain; but more impor­tantly, it diverts the atten­tion from the real issue — the issue that Brian Tan­nebaum focused on in his post.

All too many peo­ple, not just lawyers, don’t worry about the eth­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions of their actions. Social media is just new enough that it’s an envi­ron­ment where these peo­ple can slip into what they feel more com­fort­able doing — try­ing to game the system.

The sleazi­ness online won’t last, but it sure is annoy­ing in the meantime.