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You could argue that each of the last few years have been the tipping point for digital and social media in terms of its acceptance into mainstream culture, but I think you’d have a tough job proving that any was more important than 2009.

It was the year Twitter made it really, really big; the year Facebook made it even bigger; the year Rupert Murdoch said ‘no more’ to free content and the year Spotify proved everyone wrong and made music free and the labels happy.

Iran, Jan Moir, Darren Bent, Eurostar, Ashton Kutcher and the NHS are all words that have taken on a different meaning to many people after their popularity on Twitter catapulted both them and the short-messaging service to the lead items on TV news and above the fold on newspaper websites.

This was the year that celebrities, companies, politicians and the media smashed the ivory towers they had spent years building, coming down to speak to us lowly mortals wherever we may be. And en masse. This was the year that social media stopped just preaching to the converted and started to convert the non-believers.

I started the year as a huge believer in the power of social media, but 2009 was also the year I stopped believing it can foster actual tangible change. As the Telegraph’s Head of Technology, Shane Richmond, recently said about the power of internet campaigning, ‘all this revolution seems to have achieved is a change in the Christmas number one and the return of the Wispa bar.’ And given the amount of time we’ve been spending on social networking sites, this is a pretty poor return.

Ah, but this was the year of the Iranian revolution, where some Twitter users changed their avatars to green and switched their locations to Tehran to show solidarity with the protestors and frustrate the Iranian government forces. But as Evgeny Morozov points out, while the Iranian protestors used Twitter to organise mass-protests, their tool of choice was used by the government to track, arrest and question them. All Twitter did was highlight that a new weapon only gives you the advantage if the person you’re fighting can’t use it too. If not, it’s just a stalemate. This was slacktivism at its laziest: middle class westerners getting all the feelgood pleasure of intervention without actually doing anything. Given how limited internet access is in Iran – as few as a third of Iranians have internet access – Twitter played no more of a role in the revolution than people who listened to Band Aid on the radio did in eradicating third-world debt and famine in Africa. It just felt like we made a difference because we had our head in the same barrel as a lot of other people who were shouting the same slogans at the same time.

As with the Twitter mob outrage that frothed up over Jan Moir and her repulsively homophobic opinion piece on Stephen Gately’s death, it made little difference, with no one properly apologising and no heads rolling. In fact, the Daily Mail showcased a masterful tactic in the battle against social media anger: do nothing. And it worked. Twitter was shown up to be a toothless tiger whose bark was worse than its non-existent bite. Who cares if 12 angry bloggers hate the Mail? Not to mention the fact they got all those extra visits thanks to all the links.

Add to that the fact that social networks may actually make people feel more lonely, it does make it difficult to be the evangelist I once was.

This is not a call to apathy or to down tools and give up. But if we don’t face up to a tool’s limitations then we’ll never actually solve the problem.

2010 is going to be, as many have said, the year that early adopters are going to have to show that this social media stuff actually works. And that’s a good thing. We’ve been playing with the internet for 15 years since Craigslist and are only just starting to face up to the grim reality that, while it is a beautiful place to be, it isn’t an Eden that has room for all media organisations. Better we sort these issues out with social media now before we’ve got 15 years of bad habits to undo.

If Alexander Graham Bell owned a time machine when he invented the telephone all those years ago, would he have bothered putting in all that work? In my 29 years I’ve had more than my fair share of what others would call pointless telephone conversations, just laughing, quoting my favourite TV shows and sharing the minutae of my day. Of course he would. The phone may have been used to call in randsom demands in kidnappings, but it has also been used to avoid war and everything inbetween. It’s not the medium that’s important, it’s the message. Yes Twitter allows users to post nonsense – see recent BNP-related posts – but it has also been used to rally Iranian protestors attempting to see democracy overcomes a fixed election. And everything inbetween, including yes, what people are having for lunch.

Yet this banal describing of your day’s activity – what head of social media at Guardian, Meg Pickard, calls the cheese sandwich effect – is what naysayers keep focussing on.

Pickard, whose speech at the Royal Instituition I’ve just left, came under fire from one audience member who was very aggressive about the cheese sandwich effect, saying kids are ‘wasting time’ on this ’social experiment’.

But what I fail to see is what’s new? Kids have always socialised in ways adults can’t understand. And, perhaps more importantly, who’s to say which topics and methods of conversation are pointless? I have two step-kids who are six and seven and both want to join a social network all of their friends are on. Would I prefer them to be physically socializing? Yes, but it isn’t an either or situation and it isn’t my decision what type of social interaction best strengthens their bonds. Their bonds.

Personally I’ve learned more from Twitter in the last six months than I have from books – and those were books that were recommended by people I follow on Twitter. If I conversed with morons, my conversations would be moronic. If I phoned an uneducated person to talk Nietzsche I’d be left disappointed. Would that be the telephone’s fault? Connections are what’s important, not the medium of connection.

And perhaps most importantly, no one forces you to connect. The connections you make online will reflect the type of person you are outside of any digital network. Porn stars don’t mix with priests online, birds of a feather truly do flock together, as the saying goes. If you like listening to Britney, you will gravitate towards Britney fans – or they’ll at least gravitate towards you. And that’s whether you are online or offline. All social media allows us to do is what we’ve always done: find like-minded people. The real revolution is how easy that connection is to make nowadays.

So, if you find yourself online having a conversation about what someone had for lunch, perhaps you need to realise that you’re partly to blame, not the system or tools that allow you to connect to whomever you please.

James Seddon

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