Geoff Livingston wrote a post called Whatever happened to folk media that has intrigued me today.  I don’t recall seeing the term folk media before and it caught my eye.  It seems to me that social media started out as an evolution, or addition to, folk media and, like almost every other kind, they’ve been co-opted (or twisted, perhaps) as a marketing/selling medium.

Image by andyket

What is (are) folk media?

Musical instruments like banjos and acoustic guitars are well established symbols of folk music.  They evoke images of coffee houses, sing alongs, peaceful protests, festivals, and singing crowds.  The term folk, often used to describe common or ordinary people, denotes a down-to-earth, grass roots, humble, and unpretentious adjective describing any noun.  Folk lacks pretensiousness, hidden agendas, positioning, targeting, or bureaucracy.  In a very real sense, folk is “by the people, for the people”.  Folk is authentic:  real stuff by real people.

Folk media, then, are those media commonly used by individuals, not organizations.  Or so we would like to think.

This resource provided some interesting ideas about folk media:

Status and function of Folk Media:

As an intrinsically valuable form of popular entertainment or artistic expression it is worth preserving and developing for its own sake.
It is a means of changing values, attitudes and norms in order to provide a proper climate for social and economic progress.
It is a method of promoting certain behaviour acts or patterns. The aim is to get people to perform specific acts to achieve objectives of national policy (eg. visiting clinics, investing in bonds, using fertilizer) .
It is a channel for conveying information about available techniques and facilities which people may use to solve problems.

This resource goes on to list a few of these traditional or folk media outlets:

The classification covering the performing arts and the visual arts included music, song, drama, skits, puppet shows , poetry, speech, sounds, gesture, gossip, jokes, proverbs, painting, certain printed literature, sculpture, handicrafts, costuming, patterning and colouring of material and use of head-gear.

Note that virtually all of these media are reliant either upon active personal involvement or at least witnessing them in person to have the full effect.  And therein lies the limitation.

Folk media do not easily scale without great loss of power and significance.  To me, trying to broadcast folk media content over bigger audiences are like the different between watching the original Woodstock musical festival on film versus actually being there in the flesh and blood, mud, sound, and herbal essences (you know, THOSE herbal products… and the manufactured HERBAL products, if you get my drift, man.)

Social media started as folk media but…

Bulletin boards, message boards, listservs, mailing lists, static Web pages… they were the original electronic extensions of folk media.  They were crude, occasionally painful to use, and limited, but they still embodied folk because of those things.  They did not have big budgets, advertising, and filtered messages (at least not until admin and moderator roles evolved to manage scarce resources.)

People used these new media to share information, tell stories, and debate questions big and small.  They shared anger, love, fear, sadness and joy and broke a number of rules in the process, foreshadowing the many challenges against privacy, copyright, and digital rights management that seem to grow stronger daily.  Nonetheless, the times were good, the toys were relatively new and shiny, and our cultures began to change a bit as existing differences and similarities were exposed.

Along the way, though, it became cheaper and easier to move away from crude fonts, layouts, graphics, and sound while developing electronic media that were increasingly like the three mass-media pillars that somehow continue to limp along today:

• print media (newspapers, magazines, books, etc.)
• radio (voice, sound, and music)
• television/video (broadcast, cable, satellite)

Where did it really go wrong?

To me, the tipping point must have occurred around the time that organizations and individuals figured out that electronic media could deliver 80% of the same results as the old mass-media at a fraction of the cost while audience size was growing at an exponential rate.  The staggeringly low priced technology improvements, while impressive, actually sowed the seeds of destruction of social media as folk media by making it cheap and easy to use.

Audiences that could be reached at low, low cost and potentially targeted?  Irresistible.

And gradually, a medium full of real stuff from real people is being increasingly polluted by various kinds of different stuff that is being made on behalf of organizations, businesses, and their agents.

As Geoff Livingston points out, electronic folk media still exist and will probably continue to do so in user-organized communities of shared interests.  He suggests, however, that businesses and organizations will continue to push into these spaces until the social in social media eventually withers away and dies.

Who cares?

Should we care that the folkish side of social media is increasingly being overpowered by other interests?

I’m not sure, actually.  Perhaps a more comfortable co-existance can be negotiated.  Maybe social media should be regarded as spaces instead of channels or tools.  Maybe businesses will eventually abandon these spaces if they do not find the traditional KPIs that they seek.

What do you think?

Other posts that you might enjoy reading:

• Thoughts from Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer
• Maybe Every Thought Aggregates
• A simple theory on why social media is losing its mojo
• My social media processes
• The real time Web versus a reasonable time Web