According to Google, the three big features will be:

1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

Google has not provided a single universal search experience for a while, so the first of these three features is not as significant as it would seem. The second and third however are a different story.

Profiles in Search

This is probably going to the most significant feature in terms of actual user adoption, and it is also in line with the steps that Google has been taking towards becoming a key identity provider online. Search is as much a destination in itself as it is a directory, and Google is close to filling the same role as portal sites like Yahoo! used to in the 1990′s.

Adding the profiles to which the user is connected and those they might want to add to their Circles is an important piece of social functionality for Google+. On sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, the people search tools have been one of the tools driving the growth of their users’ networks.

Making Google+ profiles more visible in the results and autocomplete also creates social proof for uncommitted users that Google+ is used, and I suspect will encourage people to use it more.

People and Pages

The third feature being introduced with Google+’s closer integration with Google’s search results is the inclusion of personal profiles as  results in search, outranking older, more active and ostensibly more linked-to web properties. The importance of personal Google+ profiles in search was hinted at earlier with Google’s replacing ‘+’ with quotations for marking a word as exact match.

Google+ on a logged out vanity search

Considering how Google has used YouTube, Google Places and a number of other services within their search results, this should not have taken anyone by surprise.

How well Google+ profiles are performing in search compared to other web properties has certainly drawn criticism, although not much astonishment, from the more cynical commentators online.

There is a positive side to the performance of Google+ content in search, and that is in reputation management. It is another way to get content ranking for a brand or name that could outrank less than favourable results and bury them.

With More Social Content comes Greater Transparency

As well as the new social features, Google also announced a number of changes to their interface to give the user greater control over their search experience and to create more transparency in how the social content is used in search. The search engine also made it easy for users to remove personalised results, which feature is accessible through a toggle button:

That means no results from your friends, no private information and no personalization of results based on your Web History. This toggle button works for an individual search session, but you can also make this the default in your Search Settings. We provide separate control in Search Settings over other contextual signals we use, including location and language.

Crowding the Social Bandwagon

The most interesting reaction to Google’s Search, plus Your World came from Twitter, who seemed understandably annoyed. Even though the two companies parted ways, Search, plus Your World became an opportunity for Twitter to state their concerns on how as a “result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone” to find the breaking news and event information that Twitter has become known for.

Google+ could become a competitor for Twitter as a realtime news provider and aggregator by displaying breaking information inline with organic search results, and it is interesting to see Twitter publicly take a shot at Google over this. However, it has been a while since their content agreement expired without renewal, leaving Google’s realtime search tools dead just as Google+ was being launched.

With Search, plus Your World, it seems that Twitter is concerned that Google might be able to revive the functionality of realtime search, without having to enter another deal with their own social network.

Social without the Site

For Google+ to pay off for Google, it does not need to replace Facebook or Twitter. To succeed as an identity provider it just needs profiles, and for its users to remain logged in while using other Google products.

The search results themselves are shaping up to be the most important part of Google+, with the addition of everything from friends, personal photos and shared content, to potentially realtime updates on subjects of interest (Remember Sparks? Maybe they will come into this at some point). Google+ is not about being a destination in itself, and frankly, it does not need to be.

Living in a Fishbowl

When certain Queensland Association for Healthy Communities (QAHC) ads were pulled from bus stops around Brisbane this week, my Facebook and Twitter feeds filled with protests, jokes, demands that the ads be put back and a…

Read the full post on MarketingMag.com.au

The types of content don’t really change from one device to the next, but how I experience, find or explore content, which software, applications, platforms I use, and where and how I connect do. The people I am connected to, how and where I search, the connection stability and speed and the specifics of the device I use all affect how and what I consume online.

There is more than one way to find or do things online. Publication is easier than ever and the Internet has an almost unlimited capacity for content. TV and radio only ever had 24 hours per day to fill, newspapers have a set number of pages, and the market could only sustain a limited number of these entities. Online, these limitations don’t exist; there is always space to publish just about anything. If the content created is good enough for the user, it is attention that matters, not the platform.

Some of the best business models online involve providing a platform (Facebook, Apple App Store), a search engine (Google, YouTube) or some form of aggregator (Flipbook, Netflix). Companies like DemandMedia are the exceptions that prove the rule. Their content production model works, both before and after Google’s Panda Update (an algorithm change targeting ‘low quality’ content, which may or may not be ‘content farms’), because it is integral to their attention and audience building strategy.

What shapes the user's experience of the Internet

Many of the things that influence a user’s online experience, how they search and explore, and the information they consume fit into one of these broad categories:

• Infrastructure
• Connection Speeds and Stability
• ISP
• Application & Address Layer
• Devices
• Software
• Navigation & Discovery

A user’s experience of the Internet is shaped as much by these as by many other factors: how they find new content, the software they use, the device used, how it connects to the internet, the ISP. There are also many other services running in the background, just out of sight, such as the DNS provider, application layer and physical hardware, which also affect the end user experience. Their impact can be as dramatic as an Armenian woman cutting two optic-fibre cables or as subtle as connection speed and stability.

Sites and Portals, Clients and Servers

There is a brillant image on Doc Searls Weblog, from the post A sense of bewronging. It is a photo of a cow and a suckling calf. Doc Searls used it in a slide deck to illustrate the relationship between users and sites on the commercial web:

It’s a calf-cow model. As calves, we request pages and other files from servers, usually getting cookie ingredients mixed in, so the cow can remember where we were the last time we suckled, and also give us better services.

Online search, commercial websites and social and advertising networks now track user behaviour and information better than ever and adjust their content to suit. This trend is neither new nor limited to Google and Bing’s forays into personalised search.

Arguably this is not in the best interest of the users, especially in search. Social signals might be handy for finding a restaurant, but their value declines as the information falls further and further outside of the social network’s aggregated sphere of competence. For example, the sites a creationist might like would be utterly pointless for a query on evolutionary biology, even if the text includes the same terms.

These one-sided relationships are not just limited to the commercial web, but extend to hardware, software, the ISPs we use and ultimately to the digital and physical infrastructure of the Internet. Individual users are being moved away from an objective Internet. Tools like Google, Bing, Twitter, News.me, Facebook, and any other platform or service that serves content person by person are creating a siloed, Narrowcast Internet.

The Why and How

Search is credited with being THE way people find information online. Algorithmically generated lists of links, paid or otherwise, account for a significant amount of traffic on the Internet. Despite indexes full of optimised commercial content and with declining search literacy (Trust Online: Young Adults’ Evaluation of Web Content), arguably no motive for the search engines to provide more than An Adequate Search Result, search is still seen as the best way to find new information.

Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) are not the only place people spend their time or discover new stuff. Hitwise’s ‘Top 20 Sites & Engines’ report for the US datacentre indicates a more nuanced picture of online behaviour. The top five most visited sites for the week ending 23rd April 2010 were:

1. Facebook
2. Google
3. Youtube
4. Yahoo! Mail
5. Yahoo!

The top five for Hitwise’s ‘Top 20 Sites & Engines’ (week ending 23rd April 2010) report from their Australia datacentre was not all that different:

1. Google
2. Facebook
3. Youtube
4. Windows Live Mail
5. ninemsn

Portals, social media and email sites matter as well as search, either web or video. Other discovery modes such as link sharing via social media, email and outbound links on articles are as important for generating attention and an audience as a listing on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). The post, New Microsoft Advertising Study on “Living with the Internet”: What’s driving web behaviour? on the Microsoft Advertising Blog makes the point based on their research that users:

…start our sessions in what I would call our intimate zones seeking personal information and contact through email, social networks, blogs etc.

Curation matters, especially online, and curating requires choice. Linking, displaying, referring to content inadvertently prejudices the user against what they don’t see. The link a friend would tweet or email you to answer a question might not be the first one you would find on a Google results page. The product description you see in a company’s iPhone app can vary from the one on their Facebook page. Site content and ads can change depending on the device being used too. What a user finds to answer a question or complete a task does change depending on how they find it.

Search and curation

There are a number of different ways a user can navigate from one place to another online. Non-digital media directs users to new information, so do kinds of feeds delivered through single or multiple source applications like News.me, last.fm and The Australian’s app. Most navigation modes fall into one of the following groups:

• Search Algorithmic Link
• Search Paid Link
• Shared Link/Bookmark Link
• Non-Search Paid Link
• Unpaid Link
• Personally Bookmarked
• Direct Feed API
• User Entered Destination

Motives, Devices and Further Fragmentation

User intent plays a huge role in determining which tools they use and how. Microsoft’s ‘Living with the Internet’ report identified six different motives for the majority of online activity:

• Communication
• Information
• Entertainment
• Surfing
• Transaction
• Creation

The report explored the different motives behind Internet use by PC, laptop and netbook compared to smartphone and tablet devices. The smartphone and tablet users from the report focused on fewer motives per session than those using laptops and desktops. Mobile and tablet users were also less likely to cite entertainment and transaction motives for their time spent online.

Differences in the device’s interface, screen size and the user’s concurrent activities all probably contributed to this pattern, at least in the population studied. Ease of managing multiple browser tabs and applications probably plays a role in differentiating behaviour from one device to another. Keyboard versus touch or phone keypad input is another factor.

Mobile Matters

A post called ‘Some Milestones We Will See This Year in Mobile Statistics’ on the Communities Dominate Brands blog bought up some interesting figures on the 4.6 billion actual mobile phone handsets in use last year, along with a few interesting predictions for the coming year.

Last year, of the 4.6 billion mobile phones in use:

• 96% of all phones in use worldwide have at least a basic browser
• 71% of all phones in use had a ‘real’ web browser that was HTML compatible
• 59% can do basic apps via Java or Brew

Mobile devices are becoming an even more significant part of the user’s experience of the Internet. If all you have to use the internet with is a phone, you can’t play EVE online, WOW or run Steam. If you only use a desktop, you don’t get to use augmented reality. Use a dumb phone, and chances are you are restricted to WAP or a seriously impaired experience on non-mobile optimised sites. However, if you are using a smart or feature phone, you can access a different application ecosystem, and use location and augmented reality tools.

Cows all the way down

Our virtual world is a network of inter-dependent nodes hostage to Armenian women cutting cords, governments building walls or flicking switches, unreliable networks, hosting companies cutting cords, domain names taken down, and so much more.

A user’s experience and the information they find is the result of a large number of factors. Online services are diversifying and use more signals and cues for sorting and curating information, creating billions of different user experiences. Each of these experiences is a result of the many layers of dependencies and gatekeepers between the user and the rest of the Internet, from the hardware they use to how the information is placed in front of them.

To borrow that mental image from Doc Searls, it’s cows all the way down.

A Bribe by Any Other Name

The author of a MMORPG blog called Tobold’s MMORPG Blog has covered a lot of games since he started blogging, often with a focus on social engineering and the part it plays in influencing player behaviour. In one of his recent posts, Woot! Bribery!, Tobold discussed an incoming update for World of Warcraft (WOW) which is meant to encourage players to change their behaviour to benefit the community:

“Call to Arms is meant to lower wait times by offering additional rewards for queuing as the currently least represented role. To be eligible for the additional rewards you must solo queue for a random level-85 Heroic in the role that is currently being Called to Arms, and complete the dungeon by killing the final boss.”

The developers called this bribery. Despite their use of such a pejorative word, the idea is in line with structuring gameplay and rewards to create a particular sort of community and player interactions. This theme is one of Tobold’s favourite topics to talk about on his blog. In WOW, Guild Wars, EVE Online and many other games, the best rewards and the most impressive gear can only be achieved by tackling the toughest content in groups. One of the apparent issues in WOW is some kinds of characters are rarer than others. The Call to Arms update is meant to encourage more players to play the less popular classes and allow more people to play instead of wait for a group. How this change actually affects player behaviour remains to be seen.

Minimising Risks in EVE

User behaviour is an emergent property of any software system and as such can be very unpredictable. How the players in a game react to social engineering can be unpredictable, and sometimes not what the developers intended. The space MMORPG EVE Online’s player run event, Hulkaggedon, is a good example of how players can subvert existing mechanics.

EVE Online’s existing deterrent against incidental PVP in high security space, where the aggressor loses their ship to invincible NPCs, is countered by player donated prizes and recognition, encouraging the assault and destruction of normally safe players in defenceless spaceships. In this case, a cost to an action created by the game is cancelled out by a reward created by the players, which is enough to change the behaviour of a large enough part of the community to have the event reported on Massively, a prominent MMORPG news site.

Gaming Rewards and Motivation

Grinding NPCs in Guild Wars

As different as MMORPGs can be and as varied as the risks and rewards are, they do have a few things in common, such as linear progression through skill points, or levels, or gear, or all of the above. These badges of progression have value in the game because the world is both persistent and social.

Epic items, high levels and cool Guild or Corporation titles give status in the game. It is the social benefit of these virtual goods that motivates players to acquire them. Gamers participate in boring, grinding tasks for the reward. That the word ‘grinding’ exists and is used at all indicates how effective virtual rewards are for changing behaviour.

Why the Grind, a Game as a Second Job

Rewards in the form of gear or levels work well in MMORPGs. The skills needed to play most MMORPGs is trivial compared to many other games, and the biggest factor in how much content the player can experience is tied to their avatar’s power level. Constant progression ensures that the player is almost certainly able to succeed, eventually. As a result, some content will always be unavailable until the player reaches a power level that allows them to complete it. Tying rewards to progression attaches a cost to being a part of a group. To play with a group, the player needs to be able to participate in the same content.

This motivation to ‘grind’ also drives Raid Interface Mods (to make the game easier), Real Money Trade (RMT) for in-game items, powerlevelling services, botting and many other ways to get rewards without having to play the game. Rationalisation for this behaviour ranges from wanting to keeping up with friends, not wanting to get booted from the guild, or getting to a level fast where you can have ‘fun’ at the ‘end game’. These rewards the players chase have value for a number of reasons:

• Unlocks more content
• Allows player to accomplish ingame goals
• Marks a valued acheivement
• Provides a social benefit
• Rarity

There are a number of moderating factors that affect the perceived value of the rewards to the players. Items that are easily lost or consumed are valued less than those that are permanent. A piece of gear in a game with permanent item loss and almost unrestricted PVP does not have the same value as one in a game where it can’t be destroyed. Rarity also counts, as well as how likely the player thinks it is that the item in question will be superceded or nerfed in the next patch or expansion.

Social Media, MMORPGs and Gamification

Littlecosm Rewards

When even search is similar to a Skinner Box, rewards and simple game mechanics appearing in other forms of social media is unsurprising. Gamification takes many forms, from badges mirroring achievement systems from other games (most Steam games, for example) to systems of points or karma awarded by other community members or the platform, such as Reddit and Quora. Even the humble forum post count confers status in some parts of the Internet. Often social networks without a built-in game mechanic see one emerge from the community itself. Twitter has seen a few, from Klout to Littlecosm, a game-like, browser-based interface, as well as follower and list numbers.

Foursquare Badges

Whatever the name, the currency that social networks use or award is ultimately tied to status. As in a MMORPG, the rewards only have value when the community agrees that they do. In a game setting, these rewards are also often tied to the capabilities of an avatar. A ‘Sword of Awesome’ lets the player experience more kinds of content, or gain access to areas most other players won’t see.

In social media, this often isn’t the case, and it does not take long for people to stop chasing coloured pixels once the novelty has gone (such as Foursquare). How well game mechanics work in social media without a clear benefit remains to be seen. The effectiveness of Gamification will be as dependent on designers and developers as on how the community reacts and chooses to respond, subvert or break the mechanics. Handing out cool pixels just for the sake of it probably won’t change user behaviour for long once the newness has worn off.

EDIT: 15th April 5:39pm – Comments attributed correctly as per Tobold’s Correction in the comments

A conflict of interests

Online, someone will always need to pay. People need to eat, websites need bandwidth and servers need power. The important question is who foots the bill. Right now online, there seem to be three options:

1. The User
2. The Advertiser
3. The Investor

It is the competing interests of the user and the advertisers that often shape the user experience with Internet products like Google.com, Facebook.com and Last.fm. Making the advertiser pay can mean compromises to the user’s experience and privacy, but a user pays model will lower subscription rates and the size of the user base.

The investors are interested in a profitable company, either through revenue or a solid IPO. How this is achieved is not relevant, depending on the amount of risk they are prepared to take and how long they can wait for a return. A lot of highly visible venture capital is invested with startups focused on building a large user base, usually by providing the bulk of their services for free and moving towards either trying to get bought by someone big or an advertiser pays model.

On Twitter, @ssethi said:

As someone once said: if you are receiving a service for free, then YOU are the commodity being sold

Ultimately, if the user is not covering the cost of the service, and if the business model is not moving in that direction, then their interests are not as important as the interests of those that pay the bills. And this will be reflected in the user’s experience.

Anonymity

Online user behaviour is shaped by the features and rules of the environment within which it takes place. The tools available have a significant impact on the kind of community that develops and the social norms it adheres to. The contrast between the behaviour of a loose, anonymous community verses that of a close knit group of people using their real life identities is one example of how small differences in features can lead to contrasting behaviours. The difference between how people on Facebook act to anonymous or semi-anonymous members of forums such as 4chan (Link omitted), SomethingAwful.com, and the MMORPG forum of your choice is significant.

How people act free from moderation through investment in their avatar, peer pressure, authority or social norms is different from when they actually have something to lose. The behaviour of a community’s members is the product of two conflicting factors:

• Moderation by a perceived or real cost of violating enforced social norms
• A tendency to maximise their own enjoyment through interaction.

Being a forum warrior or trolling is a lot more fun when people only know your avatar, but not when it loses you friends, respect and access. Any change to the user’s level of privacy can come with a high perceived cost.

The outcry over each of Facebook’s privacy setting changes and the storm that erupted when it looked like World of Warcraft (WOW) was going to introduce Real ID to their forums demonstrates just how significant consistent levels of privacy and anonymity can be to a community’s members. It is not that they may lose their privacy, but that the community evolved to match the current level, and a change would be immensely disruptive.

In some communities there are benefits to linking offline and online identities together. Twitter, as used by many marketing and design professionals, is a good example. The value of Twitter as a networking tool when used in this way is high. Like other open networks, Twitter can create opportunities for discovery within groups of shared interest and through mutual contacts. LinkedIn and other dedicated professional online communities also thrive in this paradigm.

Visual Vernacular

Visual symbols and other memes are an important part of human culture. As a product of shared experiences they can make a one group or subculture distinct from another. The creation and appropriation of symbolism and cultural artefacts for a differnet purpose predates the Internet. Sampling in early hip-hop, appropriated religious iconography, symbols tied to a common experience (like ‘Kilroy was here‘) and in-jokes are all examples of how ideas and imagery can become a part of a cultural vernacular.

Social media does not mark the birth of these tendencies, it merely enhanced existing behaviour. Through new accessible tools and expanded open networks it is easier than ever for an idea to spread and content to be created and find an audience. Before the Internet it was almost impossible for most people to create or appropriate media and incorporate it into a conversation. The change is not that Rick Roll videos and parody ads are being created at all, but that the tools are more readily available, publication is cheaper and more accessible and they are being posted as a part of normal online conversation via forums, new social media, email and instant messaging.

Video, images and audio are as much a part of interpersonal communication online as the written word. On Facebook, forums, Twitter and other forms of social media they are as much a part of the conversation as its subject. The difference between publication and conversation online has disappeared as the conversation around the media becomes more visible.

People will always be people, even when they are online. Actually, people will be people especially when they are online and assume a certain level of anonymity. These emergent patterns of behaviour are not that radical, and are an extension on existing tendencies. The change is in the options open to the individual.

Social Media Sandwich

Why not go further? Why not move from a boring world of plates, knives and forks, to a place where salami and salad can be enjoyed at the same time between two pieces of bread? The sandwich is a truly revolutionary construct. Taking the best of both foods and making them available in the one easy to consume package through the medium of baked goods.

How do you eat it? Must you use a plate, can you carry it with you, maybe it is only available in a specific restaurant and you can’t take it away? Or is it the übermensch of sandwiches and able to be eaten in whatever way you see fit, and if so, is this the revolutionary development? There are a lot of content aggregation tools available now, from Friendfeed through to Google Buzz, Windows Live Messenger Beta and device specifc tools like MOTOBLUR, Flipboard and Google’s Social Search. They vary greatly in capabilities, sources of media they can access and curation tools, but they perform the same task for the user.

A lot of these services and tools take a few social media activity streams and create a single feed, but a few index or include the content linked to and present it to the user directly. Flipboard delivers this content in the app, and Google Social Search presents the links in a results page of a relevant search query.

Questions of fair use and legality aside, providing socially sourced content from multiple sources in the one place with tools to make this information manageable is a significant development in how the Internet is used. From Google’s personalisation of search to the increasing importance of social networks for filtering content and the shift away from static portals, each user’s experience of the Internet is becoming more unique.

Bing has announced some new features in search this week. Explained in the Bing Gets a Fresh Look post, content themed on Auto, Finance and Entertainment information was used to demonstrate “great new decision-making tools in [these] areas”. Similar to the enhanced Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) served by Google and Bing, these new tools take search closer to portals in their content consumption model.

In many ways SERPs are becoming more like portal content pages. Search goes beyond an ordered directory of URLs and descriptions. Content including maps, scanned books, images, video, news, blogs, product listings, and social media material is indexed and increasingly being presented in the main SERP as a part of an enhanced search result.

Indexing Entertainment Media

The Internet is an important source of entertainment, either supporting content available through other channels or material native to the web. As said by Bing’s Yusuf Mehdi in his “A New Entertainment Experience For Bing” post:

“In the field of entertainment, 76 percent of people use search to help find and navigate their entertainment options online, but only 10 percent say they have a trusted place to go.”

Entertainment information, from song lyrics to game trailers to film reviews, matters to the user, and can take many different forms. The challenge is in organising it in a human friendly way, similar to what has already started to happen with geographic information and maps. The search engine can programmatically add more content in locations under their control in a theoretically infinitely scalable fashion.

Search in the Music Business

Google is also in the entertainment business. Beyond their search properties and YouTube, Google’s acquisition of Simplifymedia during May hints strongly at Google directly entering the music business. It is likely that Google would add their product to the search experience in the same way as Google Commerce feeds (formerly Google Base) are added to the index or through applications in Chrome or Android.

Lady Gaga on Bing

Lady Gaga on Yahoo! Music

Search is starting to provide a portal-like experience. As the search experience becomes richer, more personalised and more aware of the location of the user, it gets closer to providing the experience sites like Yahoo! do, but with finer levels of customisation through queries. Pages like Yahoo! Music may soon be eclipsed by pages like Bing Entertainment or the current Bing Lady Gaga SERP. In the end it will be how the consumer prefers to consume and seek out content that will determine this. It is passive consumption versus searching with intent.

So, for a minute, can we step away from the latest buzzword-laden statement from the latest guru explaining to us mere mortals how social media “changes everything in the whole world ever for reals” and at least look at this objectively. All of the guff along the lines of democratisation of content and participation was not born with the term ‘Web 2.0′, or even ‘information superhighway’. I am afraid that these concepts are a little older than the internet as we know it today. I am sure that someone has once used these very buzzwords in relation to 1980′s hip hop, street zines, graffiti and a myriad of other forms of expression. I’m sorry to say it, but no, you are not involved in some society changing paradigm shift. Wanker.

The key changes in the way we approach media are all off the back of technology, not in the way people view or interact with the world. Creating a parody ad creative using copyright material is not new; the ability to get an international audience for it easily and for next to no cost is. The intent and drive isn’t new, the technology is what has changed.

It is also worth pointing out to some Social Media Experts^TM that people were writing journals before Blogspot, that people posted images online before Flickr, people had communities before Facebook and Myspace and you could find videos before Youtube. I know this might seem obvious, but unfortunately I suspect it needs to be mentioned, especially to those for whom the words Geocities, IRC, MUD et al mean nothing. So why have we seen such an explosion of content and memes? Why are we suddenly bombarded with so much user generated content if people had the ability and motivation to create it for ages? The current place that we find ourselves is due to a number of factors: higher connection speeds, ease of search, lowered barriers of entry.

Previously it took a certain level of competence and specific interest to have an internet connection and to use it. Browsing habits were limited by both bandwidth and speed. Sure there was video material to view in the late 1990′s, but it took ages to download. The ability to post your own content was limited by access to tools and required ability and knowledge. The scope of sites indexed in the dominant search engines was not as large as it currently is, making obscure content harder to locate. As the internet was mainstreamed through awareness of utility and ease of connection the available audience grew, and drove the growth of online communities and the advent of social media as we know it today.

So I’m sorry, but no, social media isn’t new, it is just bigger, faster and more accessible. Appropriation and conversion of cultural artefacts is not new, it is just easier to see, and you are not a unique butterfly of wonder and delight, you are just some Kool-Aid drinking wanker without the ability to take a step back and see the world around you for what it is.