On "the future of the social web"

Jeremiah Owyang of Forrest Research published his influential study The Future of the Social Web: In Five Eras. Briefly, he proposed 5 eras:
1) Era of Social Relationships: People connect to others and share
2) Era of Social Functionality: Social networks become like operating system
3) Era of Social Colonization: Every experience can now be social
4) Era of Social Context: Personalized and accurate content
5) Era of Social Commerce: Communities define future products and services

In my view, this is the evolution path of the social web as the tool. Whenever the web is reinvented with social ingredients, the virtual social web will imitate and reflect the social functions in the natural human society. If we apply Marshall McLuhan's media theory, interestingly, the social web is supposed to reshape the "natural" human society. Probably this is what Jeremiah attempted to define in the 5th era - social commerce - but in a bigger picture.

With "tool reshaping" in mind, in reality, the timeline of 5 eras would be quite blurry. The only factor that matters is the scale of impact. Tribal level of scale of the 5th era may happen much sooner and is already happening (e.g. making t-shirt online). However, pervasive scale of the 5th era (social commerce) may not happen at all, depending how to precisely define the "social commerce". If the 5th era is about decentralization, we will not see the massive scale because it's against industrial productivity. Instead, we will experience a co-existed centralized and decentralized commerce (as well as government, or any aspect in society), again, depending on the social context that can be toolized in the 4th era.

Social media is a "noise" medium

Is noise information?
It is the common sense that a communication medium should intentionally avoid or reduce the noise. Also in common sense the noise is defined as nonsense message. Since the determination of "nonsense" is quite subjective, the noise is in fact "unwanted" message. Therefore, the noise is indeed information, unwanted information.

Big picture is hidden in noises
A filtered communication medium can only carry the "wanted" message. However, the wanted information only represents limited set of states of reality. In information theory, the full spectrum of information is the white noise, representing the entire picture of reality, including both "wanted" and "unwanted". Wanted information can only render a biased picture, while the big picture is hidden in noises.

Social media carry big picture
Social media offer large degree of media freedom. There is no singular filtering mechanism such that much more noises can be carried. As a result, social media are able to carry the big picture of reality. The evolution of social media will make communication more "noisy". The more noisy, the closer to true reality.