Clay Shirky:

It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation ...

This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer. It doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we'll do it less.

To an audience of user experience professionals, such statements evince a thundering "duh".  On the other hand, one might be forgiven a certain cynicism with respect to the notion that lolcats are harbingers of social revolution.  (Not that we're too proud to admit having passed them around in email.  They are pretty fun.) 

And it's not as though no one prior to Web 2.0 has resisted the prevailing order of passive media consumption by becoming producers and participants in their own right.  Punk bands and hip-hop DJs, fanzine authors, pirate radio operators, and role-playing game aficionados - ideologically driven or not - have been a wrench in the media gearbox for decades.  It's probably not a coincidence that many early adopters of social media were also participants in these venues.  The difference is that the web by its capacity for distribution invites mass participation in a way that even public access cable never could.

But what looks obvious to us as insiders isn't apparent to everyone.  As social media and advertising converge, those of us who design for - and, perhaps more critically, participate in - collaborative networked electronic environments have a lot of schooling to do for our clients and our colleagues.  The Internet wasn't a fad like pet rocks or streaking or the Lindy Hop, and while lolcats may have had their fifteen minutes, social media as a category of experience seems unlikely to disappear.

It's not just the fad argument we have to answer, but also the notion that social media are in fact anti-social and even politically retrograde.  To which overstatement Shirky's blanket pronouncement seems a reasonable rejoinder: doing something really is better than doing nothing.  It holds a social and political promise all its own.