Jour­nal­ism stu­dents from the Dutsch uni­ver­sity of applied sci­ences in Utrecht are cur­rently con­duct­ing a sur­vey about the pop­u­lar­ity of social media — if you run a pop­u­lar blog, the ques­tion­naire prob­a­bly already arrived in your inbox. All inter­views with social media experts will be pub­lished on the cross­me­di­alab home­page — good ques­tions, I’m really curi­ous about the results of the study and my col­leagues’ answers, just mailed mine to Wolfgang.

How long have you been work­ing with online social media and what was your rea­son to get into this topic?

The ques­tion is: which online ser­vices do qual­ify as “social media”? I’ve started using the inter­net in 1994 – out of mere curios­ity. A cou­ple of years later I started work­ing as a web designer for APA (Aus­tria Press Agency). At the same time, 3 fel­low stu­dents from the depart­ment of sci­ence of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and me launched the plat­form medianexus.net – a com­mu­nity site for pub­lish­ing “grey” stu­dent lit­er­a­ture about media-related top­ics. The project doesn’t exist any­more, the site is archived in the Aus­trian National Library though. The com­ment func­tion was one our most impor­tant fea­tures back than – and even though ser­vices like Face­book and Twit­ter were lurk­ing in the far future, we used e-mail and mail­ing lists for dis­cus­sion and organ­i­sa­tion pur­poses.
To me, there is no clear-cut between “Web 1.0” and “Web 2.0” – tech­nolo­gies have evolved, dynamic web appli­ca­tions did replaced sta­tic con­tent. So the new tools fuel the use of social media, but the basic prin­ci­ple of enabling dia­logue and con­nect­ing peo­ple has been one of the main strengths of the inter­net from the beginning.

Why do you think online social media is so popular?

The for­mula of sim­plic­ity has got a lot to do with that: take Twit­ter, for instance: despite the com­plex­ity of the ser­vice, it’s extremely easy to reg­is­ter and to post; even Face­book with all its apps and fea­tures is pretty much self-explanatory. The first com­plex online ser­vices were all about the tech­nol­ogy – built by tech­ni­cians for tech­ni­cians. This has def­i­nitely changed.
Yet there are two more impor­tant fac­tors: on the one hand, old media gen­er­ated an enor­mous hype that reached its peak when Obama won the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. And on the other hand, many of these ser­vices develop a strong “suc­tion” over time: as soon as a cer­tain per­cent­age of your friends use Face­book (and tell you about it offline), you’re bound to get curious.

What do you think are the main motives for peo­ple to use online social media?

Triple-C: Curios­ity, Con­ve­nience and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Wikipedia sta­tis­tics show clearly that only a tiny per­cent­age of the over­all vis­i­tors pro­duce more than 90% of all arti­cles – not every­one will become a pub­lisher, that was a com­mon mis­con­cep­tion in the early days of social media. But enhanced com­fort as well as bet­ter (and cheaper) means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion attract nearly everybody.

Do you think use of online social media has an impact on the way peo­ple com­mu­ni­cate in ordi­nary life? If so, in what way?

It clearly does – but this is not a spe­cialty of social media; this applies to all main­stream media. McLuhan wrote some very inter­est­ing things about the way media shape our notion of the envi­ron­ment. I believe it’s too early though to describe the kind of change which­hap­pens right now.

What is the future of online media? Do you think that online social media is going to be here after ten years?

The near future of online media is con­nected to the eco­nomic via­bil­ity of the under­ly­ing busi­ness busi­ness mod­els. Twit­ter is prob­a­bly going to make some decent money soon, Face­book is still strug­gling – and these are two of the biggest play­ers. But I see a lot change hap­pen in the field of blog­ging for exam­ple: cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism and hyper-local news will – in the not-so-long-run – replace a lot of news­pa­pers and magazines.

But even if some play­ers will not sur­vive a pos­si­ble web 2.0 crash, peo­ple will con­tinue using the inter­net – even a lot more. Many key-technologies are avail­able as Open Source — the net doesn’t depend on cor­po­ra­tions, not even big G. The evo­lu­tion of social media will con­tinue to hap­pen at an amaz­ing pace, so it’s rather impos­si­ble to pre­dict the future. Actu­ally, there’s only one fact I’m 100% sure about: in ten years, folks will use social media in ways we could never imag­ine today.