Far from being an open and creative playground with unlimited horizons, I sometimes wonder if the travel blogosphere, Facebook, Twitter, etc, aren’t naturally restrictive influences.
Years and years ago I remember watching, literally with my jaw-dropped in amazement, a ground-breaking new TV game show in the UK called Blankety Blank. It had a formula that is now sadly universal. The contestants had to answer a question with the same answer as the majority of the celebrity panel or audience.
“Wait!” I thought. “These people are being rewarded, not for being right or being exceptional, but for being average??!!”
The celebration of mediocrity has become commonplace and unless travel bloggers guard against it, there is a danger of slipping all too easily into a world of bland… because this is the way our Facebook friends do it, those are the subjects my Google+ circles talk about, these are the ways my Twitter friends think about that subject, that’s the way my Instagram chums take photos, that’s what my Last FM friends listen to, those are the sort of places my Foursquare friends eat, and that’s the kind of thing my blogging mates tend to write about.
We might think we are open-minded, but how diverse are our ‘influencers’? The bloggers you subscribe to and the tweeps you follow – what percentages are university/college/school educated, single/married, religious/secular, black/white, female/male, well-travelled/un-travelled, fit/un-fit, geeky/artistic, etc?
And what about the numbers? Consider social search and its restrictive influence on ‘ordinary folk’.
With hundreds or thousands of friends & followers, most of us in the travel blogosphere have a pretty broad gene pool to draw on for ideas, but what about ‘the man in the street’ with say 80 followers on Twitter and 30 on Facebook? (Does anyone know what the averages are BTW?) What happens to them when they use Trippy.com or Bing Social Search? Take a look at the demo videos on those last two examples and consider just how far ‘out of the box’ those people are going to think when planning their trips!
You can see how powerful and attractive social media is…
… for advertisers and marketers! It gathers together like-minded people in one place. “Brilliant! says Mr Marketer “If this guy likes crunchy pecan ice-cream, the chances are some of his friends will too, and I can get him to suggest to the others that they try it as well!”
But how good is it for us?
Shouldn’t we be striving to do things differently from our friends? Enjoy their company but guard against being like them or copying them?
At my radio station the ‘luvvies’ (presenters, producers) were always under pressure from the sales people to reproduce success. “This programme/presenter is getting fantastic stats. The audience want more. We should schedule something similar”. We always had to explain that, of course the audience want more – they don’t know what else there might be! Do you imagine a tv programme like Monty Python’s Flying Circus was born in the sales office or the programming office?
Why do you think cable/sat TV channels are stuffed to the gunwales with cooking/chef contests, garden/house makeover programmes, and police/fishing reality programmes? Because an independently creative mind came up with the first one, it was successful, and the drones repeated the formula.
So, who do you want to be? Captain James T. Kirk or the Borg?
Image: net_efekt
“So, who do you want to be? Captain James T. Kirk or the Borg?”
I’d rather be the guy who operates the transporter, so I could avoid 7- or 8-hour transatlantic flights.
As for social media (or social-networking sites, as we called them in the olden days a couple of years ago), I think their influence–whether for good or bad–is overrated and overstated. The typical “man in the street” hasn’t even heard of Trippy.com or Bing Social Search. He’s more likely to be influenced by review and community sites like TripAdvisor and Cruise Critic.
Hey Alastair! Nice write up. This is part of a much larger discussion relating to social media and it’s ability to create self-reinforcing silos… and i find this subject fascinating. But in travel (at least as it relates to Trippy) we are seeing something else happen that should be noted… inspiration. Trippy is turning dreaming into doing. When people see that their friends are taking trips and exploring the world it makes those trips appear very doable. Additionally, when those friends chime in and help you start planning your own trip that is a huge push to making what would have otherwise only been an aspirational trip, a reality. That’s a good step to get more folks out there seeing the world. Sure, we’ll still have aspiration periodicals and bloggers like Gary Ardnt http://http://everything-everywhere.com/ (one of my favs) that we can call on when we want to learn something that none of our friends have ever done before, but it’s also great to know we have friends who can provide not only inspiration but help along the way.
(To answer your question, Facebook has stated that the average number of friends across their site is 180)
Hey JR, relax. I’m a fan of Trippy. I’ve even recommended it to one of our team (and I know where Gary sits on it too!) I was really using it as a vehicle to ponder the question ‘how blue sky is somebody’s thinking if they are only guided by friends & family?’
I think that social media is just as likely to expose people to new things as it is to do the opposite.
Before social media, people just asked their friends where to go. The fact that adventure travel is increasing seems to be evidence of this.
I am of the opinion that any travel is better than no travel. If someone does the same thing their friends do, but it results in them doing something they otherwise wouldn’t have done, that isn’t a bad thing.
Yep, I think we are lucky. We’re talking about the limitations of social media in the context of travel – which is itself one of the most efficient mind-liberating processes available to man! Like you say “any travel is better than no travel”.
I’m really just exploring the restrictive aspect of social media. Let’s imagine we all worked in the financial sector. Now, if a banker engages mostly with his social network of white, middle-class, middle-aged, Republican influencers, how ‘pushing-the-envelope’ open-minded is he going to be compared to embracing the whole Internet?
It’s an artificial argument (not least because if the Internet weren’t there he would still be mixing with those same people IRL) but I think it’s healthy to be aware of the tendency of social networks to iron-out eccentricities.
Put another way: Before the Internet your social horizons were limited to friends & family. Now, with the advent of Social Media we’re back to that situation. It’s important to keep an eye on, or at least be aware of, what’s happening *outside* your social circles and not become too introspective or clubby.
Alastair, one could also argue that social networking and the Internet in general have helped people escape conformity and blandness by interacting with a wider range of people and topics than they’d find in their home communities.
Also, as the Google+ “Circles” concept demonstrates, your hypothetical banker is more likely to widen his horizons online than at the local Chamber of Commerce or country club. He may be a churchgoer on Sunday, a Rotarian on Monday, and a Republican at Tuesday’s Republican fundraiser, but on Wednesday he may be playing Fantasy Baseball with a black sailor on Guam or sharing another type of fantasy play with a dominatrix who just got home from Occupy Wall Street.
Excellent points, Durant.
(and the obvious ‘hole’ that I was hoping nobody would spot!)
But you get the general drift. It’s too easy to get wrapped up in social media without stepping back occasionally to check your assumptions.
Interesting observation about the “guess the answer the majority gave” genre–I’ve never liked such games, but I think my instinct would’ve been to classify them as being about being in touch with majority opinion or being to intuit what the masses know or think. I hadn’t thought of it as a celebration of one’s ability to fit in and think like the average, mediocre Joe, but it’s an interesting data point for sure.