Warren Ellis Frustrated With Social Media; Highlights a Feature/Bug

Writer and internet presence Warren Ellis recently posted his observations regarding current social media: http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14404

His complaints aren’t unfounded, and his observations are as ever, spot on.

What is interesting is that perhaps he’s coming up against are not failing of social media, but instead are the result of truly social networks. Facebook, Twitter, even Google+ basically exist to make one-to-one connections. Things start trending, peaking, hyper-sharing, whatever, when it grabs the public and the public movies it.

Warren’s big issue was numbers; too few people actually seeing his content in social media, compared to the much larger amounts of people subscribed to his accounts, pages, etc.

But that’s because he’s looking for a broadcast result in a medium designed to diffuse the content down to individuals interacting.

Silver Lining in the Harper Overcast

There’s a story behind the story.

There’s a buzz in the air with same-sex marriage, on a justice department’s ruling on an attempt for two women, married in Canada, to get divorced. The law stated that for a divorce to occur, the couple needed to have lived in Canada for a year. The couple declined that option, and contested the ruling. At this point, the lawyer suggested an alternative; their wedding was never valid because their home nations (the U.K. and the U.S. respectively) don’t recognize same-sex marriage, and they never lived long enough in Canada to be citizens.

(I wonder if this alternative was suggested as a well-meaning attempt to give them what they wanted; out of the marriage.)