Social Media Carrying the Coffeehouse Torch
The coffeehouses of London in the late 1600’s fostered conversations, business, innovation and broke down barriers between people of different classes. The cost of entry was equivalent to the cost of a cup of coffee and the reward was unfettered access to the other patrons. At the time, the coffeehouses were criticized as being a waste of time and a distraction. Sound familiar? The parallels between those coffeehouses and social media today are eerily familiar.
Tom Standage wrote an article on the subject for the New York TImes (click here). This enjoyable article makes direct comparisons between the criticism faced by London coffeehouses and the enormous contributions they made to the society of the day with social media of today.
Like the coffeehouses, social media has a low barrier to entry (fill out a form and you’re in) and engenders discourse and interaction between people from all walks of life and from around the world. It also fosters business, research for buying, staying in touch, etc. New ideas are sparked and honed and businesses form in an instant.
But, we aren’t taking advantage of social media in the same way those Londoners were able to enjoy their coffeehouses.
I’ve been doing some thinking and experimentation with various social media platforms (a significant part of the value we provide our clients is via digital marketing). Like many, I use the various platforms for social and business use and sometimes, as in personal interactions, the lines blur. Like a coffeehouse, people will have a preference for platforms. Some prefer Pinterest for it’s visual appeal, Twitter is great for short snippets, Facebook let’s us share pictures and text freely, YouTube has videos on anything you can imagine, LinkedIn hums with business and Google Plus is finding its feet.
Unlike the coffeehouses, each of these platforms has specific rules, computer run “police” that will ban or restrict you, and are completely different on the inside. None of them is the “perfect” environment capable of reproducing the same impact of the coffeehouses. In London you could go to different coffeehouses based upon your interests (like groups in many latforms) and you would understand the environment without a second thought.
In social media, it’s rare to find somebody that can seamlessly flow from platform to platform with the same impact – it’s too hard to keep up with the conventions and be an expert on each.
You may counter with the suggestion that you can go from group to group within a social platform and have the same “coffeehouse” experience, but most groups are flawed. Public groups have become spam targets and few see worthwhile conversation. Private groups can have great interactions, but are not open for people to discover easily.
Rather than being about the experience of the customer as the coffeehouses were designed to be, social media platforms seem to be quite focused on an average user that doesn’t exist. In trying to defend against spam, protect privacy and most importantly answer to the short-sighted strategy-killing quarterly report, they produce artificial constraints that dampen the potential positive impact they could be making.
One platform that I won’t lump into this category of “could have beens” is Google Plus. I’ve been on it since it started and have several thousand people in my circles and am circled by a few thousand as well. But, only recently have I turned my focus on becoming more of an expert user and I have been delighted by my early findings and results.
To begin with, I sought out people who looked like experts who were active and engaged with them. The several that I reached out to have been willing and quite helpful as I seek out the best way to engage with people and share and receive value. People are engaged on topics, conversation threads are robust and there seems to be a sense of camaraderie.
I’ve also found the communities great resources. It is almost as if each community is akin to a coffeehouse. The rules are the same, with a few variations and the topic segregations and sub-divisions are helpful. I’ve also found that unlike a few other platforms, spam accounts seem to be few and far between. I’ve been in Facebook groups where the membership roles had thousands of people with variations on the same name.
I won’t be so silly as to proclaim Google Plus the logical inheritor of the coffeehouse culture, it has it’s flaws and limitations as well. But, it is the closest that I’ve found, at least in my early opinion.
Obviously, we don’t have a direct comparison to London’s coffeehouse culture today. We have fantastic platforms that have enabled us to do incredible things, but not that wide-open forum that fosters innovation, connections, progress, etc in a manner not controlled by the varying policies of each platform.
I don’t have the answer and most of this article is a musing in place, but one notion keeps bouncing around my head. Would a social media platform that was the equivalent of Linux be a solution? Could an open source social media platform that combined the best of the private platforms be the answer? It may not be the best, but it could be good enough to replicate the coffeehouse culture and it would also keep the other platforms innovating to keep their user bases.
What do you think?
Michael Nelson
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