the reflexions insider

When it comes to fragmentation of audiences, markets, and media, the trend line is clear: we are collectively becoming not a single audience of billions but a million audiences of thousands, hundreds, or even one.

It’s a fascinating long term side-effect of media decentralization that’s been predicted for decades by media visionaries like Marshall McLuhan (pictured right) and, dare I say, Andy Warhol. The one-to-many paradigm of network television and weekly newsmagazines understandably has a homogenizing effect, both in reinforcing a common identity and in shaping public opinion. The many-to-many model of social media and its various manifestations (blogs, wikis, social bookmarks) has been turning this model upside-down.

Of course marketers have been using this to their advantage for years, from the highly targeted narrowcasting as seen in political campaigns to highly personalized direct mail. But the social web is both responding to and further cultivating this fragmentation.

Social platforms like Ning have emerged to provide ad hoc and on-demand networks meant to service everything from 5-person knitting clubs to Jay Z’s millions of fans. The single-network solutions like MySpace and Facebook have been incredibly powerful in generating public awareness of social networks. But they have discovered that the users of today’s web are a fickle bunch, quick to respond to trends and coalesce en masse around newcomers - a lesson that the now-irrelevant Friendster learned all too well and too late.

The lesson: social platforms must be nimble and highly adaptable to both enable and foster the niche micro-networks that will drive increasing specialization and fragmentation among the web’s one and a half billion users. The new social web is not a single network but a vast array of millions of them.

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