What can social media tell us about the future?

That was focus of a workshop Sandra and I led recently as part of IIR’s Future Trends conference, the goal of which was to explore how the social media sphere can be used as resource for identifying, monitoring and analyzing future trends.  It was an afternoon-long session so there’s too much to cover in a blog post, but what follows are some of big themes.

The social media sphere has become the primary means for disseminating information and ideas throughout society.

The social media sphere can be divided into six categories: Wikis, Blogs, Content Ranking sites (Digg, Technorati, etc), Boomarking sites (Del.icio.us, Stumble Upon, etc), Visual media (Flickr, YouTube, etc) and Social Networking sites. All are seeing exponential growth:

In 1993 there were 130 web pages; today there are over 108 million.*  There are over 2.5 billion Google searches every month. According to Technorati, there are 120,000 blogs created every day; that’s about 1.4 per second.  Japanese is the world’s number one blogging language; English is number two, followed by Chinese.  The 10^th?  Farsi.

Facebook currently gets over 60 billion page views per month, making it the 6^th most trafficked site in the U.S. Flickr is home to 3.5 million photos - 82% of which are public. Wikipedia has more than 75,000 active contributors, working on some 9 million stories in more than 250 languages. And don’t even get me started on Twitter.

The Clickstream Culture & Making the Invisible Visible

As inherently social spaces (in which users share, collaborate, create, ideate and muse) social media sites act as idea transmission systems.  The clickstream of our online lives - our Google searches, Facebook walls, del.icio.us links and blogs - are digital archives of our thoughts, ideas, emotions, behaviors, actions and desires.  Collectively they create a collage of our lives, rendered visible to the world (John Battelle calls this the Database of Intentions). In a sense, we’re making the invisible visible.

And here’s the punch line:

 If We Can See It, We Can Map It

For the first time in history we are able to see - in a real, tangible way - the physical movement of ideas throughout society.  To use a familiar metaphor, we can think of the social media sphere as a complex urban environment where blogs act as villages, bookmarking sites become neighborhoods, ranking sites are cafes (or billboards), Wikipedia is a community garden, Facebook a dense city center.  The links and trackbacks and blogrolls which connect them become highways and roads on which ideas travel. 

Because we can “see” this landscape, we can map it. The electronic exhaust of our clickstream culture allows us to see how a thought, a meme, a sentiment move from blog to Digg to delicious and beyond.

The New Physics of Information Flow

By understanding the “physics” of information flow throughout various social media platforms, we can use them to identify and track future trends. Several transmission models have emerged in recent years to map information flow, including Social Network Analysis (SNA) (mapping of human relationships), Complexity theory (a “systems” view) and epidemiological models (a popular metaphor and model, using the modeling of disease epidemics to understand how ideas spread by identifying their source and mapping “infection” rates).

A final model draws from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point which attempts to explain how ‘social epidemics’ spread via three types of people: connectors, mavens and salesmen.  Categorizing social media platforms in the same way provides  an interesting lens through understand how - and why - ideas spread in the social media sphere:

Connectors : social networking sites & bookmarking sites, which connect large (and often diverse) numbers of people;

Mavens: blogs & wikis, which are knowledge hubs on topic areas;

Salesmen: content ranking sites & media sites, which “promote” an idea and provide a context for its popularity.

NEXT UP: Social Media and Foresight ….

*(that, BTW, is mind-blowing if you think about it. I’m rather unsurprised by the number of web pages today, but I admit that it’s almost incomprehensible to think that at one time there were ONLY 130 web pages in the world. Total. Wow.)

note: THANK YOU to our colleagues at Pinkegreen Design for designing the above Social Media Map; the online version will be available in a few weeks.