Social Media: A New Perspective

Recently, a rather old-fashioned word crept into our popular vocabulary - “narrative”. The thematic qualities of this term resemble a story’s ‘arc’ or the more sinister ‘sub-text’.

Whatever the moniker, this broader, almost minimalist approach to identifying what actuality matters in the ‘scheme of things’ is both a waste saver and a potential red light to crowds powered by the sheep mentality.

In the language of the dismal science, a macro-trend is just such an arc. Standing back, absorbing this vista means taking in a new perspective, and perhaps a new conclusion.

Such an approach has a habit of making the otherwise absurd, obtuse and the downright ambiguous as clear as crystal.

Take for example the synopsis that, for at the least next 50 years, Australia will never suffer a recession, a slow-down perhaps, but never two quarters of negative growth.

This brash, binary call isn’t presumptive at all. Taking your eyes off the next pothole, and back onto the horizon, you realise Asia’s middle class isn’t yet, relatively speaking, a mass market; that’s still a century into the future.

In the meantime, Australia’s minerals, agricultural produce and intellectual property will be sucked northwards like a twister in the sky, fuelling smelters, stomachs and minds.

A macro-trend of that magnitude won’t be diverted, or distracted, by a case of broker embezzlement, Chicken flu or even the next Al Qaeda suitcase bomb.

Ergo, Australia is recession-proof for the next half century.

Another macro trend relates to the long-term consequences of a networked world and the digitisation of assets, particularly intellectual property.

Social media in all its clever and hard-to-monetise guises, is its own type of macro trend. Like the ‘golden rule’ that economic growth requires the consumption of commodities, the ‘rule’ of social media is that the more people broadcast their lives, the more self-aware they become of the ‘content’ of their routines, including the experiences and memories that punctuate their days.

Put plainly, the larger and more active our digital networks become, the more we need to entertain these ‘audiences’ with worthy anecdotes and clever impressions.

Social networks are not sustained by the mundane, the average or ‘middle of the road’, they glow white hot with what we can muster that is ‘jagged and shiny’.

From this point onwards, the macro trend we call social media takes on a new persona – a mass audience and mass market for the unique, the tangible, and the experiential that cannot be replicated by processing lines of code.

Importantly, this shift is not based on the division of wealth, where the less well off are subjected to a commoditised, homogenised existence. On the contrary, the attribute of wealth is in fact neutered by the intellectual and creative elements that increasingly dictate terms. The artisan, the scientist, the explorer – these are the new rule makers. They personify a new aesthetic, largely detached from the materialism that has characterised the ‘acquisitor age’ (Ravi Batra).

It is this aesthetic that now ignites a more authentic introspection on the part of so many more individuals; indeed, a more widespread perspective on what contributes to happiness and wellbeing.

This search for quality, uniqueness and beauty is nothing new, only the scale of the phenomenon has altered; a scale made possible by the diffusion of network technology and our desire to broadcast ourselves committing to new experiences and a re-weighting of particular values.

The trajectory of this macro trend, or social arc, is unstoppable. Being on the cusp of this mass movement, where an increasing number of individuals now put their lives, their decisions and their associations into perspective, means institutions likewise must now recast their own assumptions about consumer motivations and political relations.