#smcakl is Social Media Club Auckland. It’s a group of social media aficionados who meet regularly and chat about social media. These experts range from corporate media consultants to consultants trying to get into corporate media. It’s a mix of the well heeled and quirky geek cool. Organic cider and boutique pizza were the catering inside Vodaphone’s Telecommunications Fortress on Viaduct Harbour Ave and that nice Ben Gracewood was there.
Sadly it became quickly apparent seeing Ben would be the only highlight.
I’m not sure why my expectations were so quickly dashed. The missing plane jokes at the beginning by the host should have alerted me to this not being the cerebral social media philosophical discussion I was hoping for. #smcackl in election year featured Jacinda Arden (Labour), Gareth Hughes (Greens), Vikram Kumar (internet Party) and Scott Simpson (National) and I suppose I expected an intense discussion about the role of consumer culture promoting a narcissistic ‘me first and the gimmie, gimmies’ world of selfies which has reset the political idealogical compass.
It’s safe to say it never got close to that. Gareth was good as always, Jacinda was excellent, Scott Simpson was coma inducing but the most important thing said by the entire panel was by Vikram when he said ‘Social media is social’. At the time his comment created a ripple of snide sniggering but if you check out the inane and pointless twitter commentary that was running during the meeting, his comment was insightful. Cats and bloody sunset photos are the intellectual high points for most of the social media world and it was a reminder that at least 90% of Twitter & Facebook feeds are pointless bullshit that adds nothing to humanity.
Social media has a role to play in this election, but the limitations of what people find share worthy is always its weakness.
Sounds like the meeting was as inane as the various social media themselves appear to be – but thanks for a useful report on it!
(And YES the word “MEDIA” is PLURAL – so don’t bother berating my choice of grammatical construction. I’m old-fashioned).
Thanks Bomber – I feel a whole lot better about not going now! I must say when I saw the list of speakers I thought it a bit weird asking the FB-expert Greens to share their tips with the bad guys, but I suppose it’s nothing they can’t see for themselves online.
“Cats and bloody sunset photos are the intellectual high points for most of the social media world and it was a reminder that at least 90% of Twitter & Facebook feeds are pointless bullshit that adds nothing to humanity.”
Social media is nothing more than a communicative tool – so if your facebook feed is full of idiocracy, that just says something about the user rather than the tool. If somebody’s feed adds nothing to humanity, then it simply means that the owner of the profile adds nothing to humanity.
If someone posts shit repetitively then I block them, and I sign up to interesting pages and news pages; problem solved.
Also, its worth remembering that selfies are the result of an existing political ideology. Selfies never reset anything.
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