Social Media Is Bullshit by B.J. Mendelson

Author:B.J. Mendelson [Mendelson, B.J.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012-09-03T14:00:00+00:00

SO IS THIS PEOPLE JUST BEING DEFENSIVE, OR SOMETHING ELSE?

I’m not so sure. The knee-jerk answer is that everyone mentioned in this part of the book has something they want to protect. If Chris Brogan had been called out over his Google+ Webinar by someone with a big enough platform, he would have lost a lot of money. In the case of Jeff Jarvis, Tim O’Reilly, and other Cyber Hipsters, it’s a bit more complicated.

The reason was nicely summed up by Evgeny Morozov. “Left unchallenged, [Internet intellectuals] may succeed in convincing us that we do indeed inhabit the digital wonderland of their imagination.”18 But let me take it a step further: The Internet intellectuals (or Cyber Hipsters), marketers, analysts, and their friends have succeeded. The existence of the myth of “social media” is proof of that. And it’s important that we start cleaning up the mess they’ve created. Now that you know how this group is going to fight you, you can prepare for it and fight them back with the truth. What’s needed now is for us to take a more active approach in standing up to their misinformation, calling them out on it, and making sure the media outlets, among others, who feature these parties are holding them accountable and to the highest ethical standard. It’s no longer acceptable to have, for instance, Pete Cashmore of Mashable.com writing op-eds for CNN where he’s promoting companies he has business relationships with in those op-eds, as he’s done numerous times.19 These are practices that breed further misinformation and myths that will continue to do irreparable harm to small businesses, artists, and entrepreneurs.

This book is a tour of the bullshit factory. So far I’ve showed you a lot of the bullshit products that get released, how they came to dominate online marketing, and why they’re bad news. Now let’s take a closer look at how exactly the bullshit spreads.

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