final blog part 2

I definitely do not think that the new trend in social media will be towards a wikitopia or even web-topia, at least not any more than it already is. In today’s media-enhanced world I feel that it keeps evolving and new technology and sites keep coming out fast enough that no one individual (corporation) is popular long enough to become so powerful. Myspace was the new everything in terms of social networking only about 5 years ago, and now Facebook has surpassed every aspect of it. I do believe that it is possible for corporations to capitalize on the teen and young adult market with their seemingly unending stream of cash by monopolizing everything we see on the internet, television, magazines, anything, so that it can be traced back to one source. This would be the next step that TV networks like MTV were doing in the 90s. Their parent company would dictate exactly what was seen on the show in order to please their clients, i.e. ads for Sprite and Virgin Records, because it was all about the revenue. In this way they produce the most money until teens realize they are being manipulated and then they move on unless marketing has anticipated this, which they normally do, and have already begun the next string of consumerism. In a way, social media is evolving at an extremely rapid rate, but since companies cannot always account for where teens will go next, we are inherently unpredictable, some companies get left behind unless they are willing to go to similar extremes as the consumers are. Today, Facebook is where MTV probably was over a decade ago in terms of reaching out to as many people as possible and changing the way they receive and send news. Much like AOL’s instant messenger, which Facebook has only ‘recently’ brought back, today’s youth is communicating more and more with their peers and whoever is willing to converse with them in similar mediums. Even to a high schooler, the idea of using Twitter is met with a response akin to “that’s for old people (re: over 25) and Lindsay Lohan. I definitely do not think that social media will end up as some sort of one-minded, evil dominated empire anymore than it already is. Although with the way technology is heading and where the world already is, it is impossible to say what abilities we will have eventually and how we and those in ‘power’ (re: mega-corporations or the consumer? The mook or Viacom?) use that capacity.