Loren Feldman hates “social media.” Why should you care? Because he makes good points about crowd mentality.
I would get into semantics and explain how social media and wisdom of the sheep/crowds are two different things, but it’s irrelevant to the point he’s making. He does make some very valid points about the place of creativity and individuality. Of course I strongly disagree with him on some issues, but you’ll have to make your own mind up on where you stand.
I think the categories he uses below the video are the best part. Ze Frank? Mark Cuban? Nice.
The following link may contain strong language, tattoos, gold chains, half naked unshaven men and vitriolic hyperbole offensive to some viewers and will make any children nearby cry (and pay no attention to his LinkedIn or MyBlogLog links on the right or the YouTube logo in the video)…
How’d you find him?
I’ve been watching Loren for a few months now after finding him via Scoble. Then, Loren got the golden ticket to join the PodTech.net video network and he’s gone all mainstream.
He’s actually a really nice guy behind the scenes and we share a love of boston terriers. I do hate his gold chains, though (scroll down a little for my comment).
He’s obviously correct about the “wisdom of crowds” thing, but I think he’s missing the point of social networks. To say that social networks are all about a crowd finding valuable links/material via their votes/diggs/bumps is to reduce social networking to a series of popularity contests — which are bad in any context. Of course the most popular YouTube vids, Digg posts, etc are going to appeal to the lowest common denominator. To me the value of social networking isn’t with respect to the “popular” memes etc, it’s being able to find members of a niche community and use that community as a base for learning, fun, whatever. As a marketer you can use it for other things of course.
I could get into a much deeper conversation here about the role of humans in a larger society and what their “goals” should be, but suffice it to say that I’d argue that many of the things people tend to value (knowledge, love, happiness) can be better accomplished with online social networking than without.
What an idiot.
You gotta take Loren for his shtick, which is snark. I didn’t like him at first either, but he’s grown on me once I accepted his snarkiness.