Mainstreaming of the social web and instant personal content: It’s (all) not pretty

A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation about trends in the social web for 2010 to our clients at iCrossing in the UK.

Predicting anything about the web is a fool’s errand, but one somehow many of us can’t helping running anyhow. However, the main, underlying trend that it is hard to see being undone or even slowing down for some time, is what I called the “mainstreaming of social media”.

The image I jokingly used to illustrate this was a Daily Mail headline from early 2009: “How Facebook could raise your risk of cancer”

Image: Daily Mail Facebook cancer slide

If the Daily Mail says it gives you cancer, I reasoned, it was something that had become part of everyday life in Britain.

Ho ho ho…

There is a darker side to mainstreaming of the social web, of the putting into the hands of every single person the means of production and distribution of content. And the realtime element that Twitter and mobile devices brings makes that instant personal production and distribution.

Create. Capture images. Publish to the world in a moment.

Today I read thoughtful posts from both Paul Carr and Euan Semple about some of the “citizen journalism” that came out of the Fort Worth massacre last week and of other examples of where people have behaved in questionable ways using Twitter and the web while those around them suffered. Questionable…

Some thoughts on me blog about mainstreaming, citizen journalism etc...