Selfish Media.

If you asked most people on social media, whether they were interested in the goings on of their friends and their social circle, the answer would be yes. If you asked the same people how often they collaborated with their social media friends on projects, initiatives and tasks, the answer is likely to be never. Seems the voyeuristic side of us is still glued to social sites and our interest is constantly piqued by new developments in each other's lives but it wanes quickly and is replaced by self interest. The celebrity syndrome is alive and prospering through the ability to look but not interact online and also because we all see ourselves as the star in our own movie.

Yet isn't it all about being social and getting together on the new platforms? Getting together to do what? The very early detractors of sites such as Facebook commented on the amount of self preening done with the "look at me, look at me" syndrome driving up the numbers of members because everyone had something to say or to show. So are people really interested in your last holiday snaps, the Birthday party you catered and dutifully photographed and uploaded or the self serving retweets of a story from The Economist to make you look intelligent? Not really, seems the people most interested in us, is us.

For all of the social interaction numbers quotes in the hundreds of millions, it seems online, we are quite happy to play on our own, making sure we have the nicest pictures, the nicest apps, the nicest music and the nicest stories about, you guessed it, us. That slide show of your trip to Bali used to bore even your Mother but now you don't care because you are sure everyone else is interested in viewing your page. With the proliferation of sites like Pinterest el al, the opportunity to get down to the smallest ecosystem of interest, gives people even more chance talk about themselves in siloed silence.

It's this self interest and lack of collaboration that is causing the media pundits concern. Seems many were convinced social sites would bring a strong sense of community and collaboration back to the individuality of the last few decades. Guess the "Like" button hasn't quite measured up to building new communities and no amount of holiday pics will engage any more than a passing interest. Or is it social fatigue being inundated by the flood of information about others, when all we want is more attention ourselves?

Still all is not lost as social collaboration sites develop to bring people together in social wikis, social search, groupware and software that has an aim and an objective of action.
Clay Shirky defines social software as “software that supports group interaction". If we can collaborate virtually like we can in real life, then there is hope for the social landscape to develop into more than a self interested, self centred destination, just ask Karsten Horne.