Here is an end-of-the-summer thought for all of my friends in social media:

We've all gotten so busy screaming into miasma of Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, etc. that we've forgotten the real magic of the net.

As my buddy Doc said a decade ago: it's about conversations.

Before there was social media as the lubricant that makes e-commerce 2.0 work, before blog posts were seen as a way to grease the inside sales machine, people put shit online because they could. And other people read it because it mattered.

In the past few weeks I've been struck by a few pieces that have smart folks asking the same question that's been in my mind: if all we are using these new social tools for is to scream louder than the next guy in the hopes of winning some arbitrary popularity contest, have we really got anything here?

The first was Leo Laporte (of Screensavers fame) who somehow exposed a bug in the complex series of pipes he had set up to magnify his self-promotional screed and discovered that lo and behold, no one was really listening! I've loved Leo's commitment to serious content for more than a decade now, so when he complains about not being heard, it's worth listening.

The second was the wonderfully written piece by Jonathan Harris on "our digital crisis." Though I've never met Jonathan, he writes beautifully and expresses something that most people trading incremental minutes at the grocery store to tweet and poke should think about:

Most online experiences are made, like fast food, to be cheap, easy, and addictive: appealing to our hunger for connection but rarely serving up nourishment. Shrink-wrapped junk food experiences are handed to us for free by social media companies, and we swallow them up eagerly, like kids given buckets of candy with ads on all the wrappers.

Finally, just to close out the dark thoughts about the mass stupification that might just be bringing us closer to Idiocracy by the day, the Economist piece on Jaron Lanier is worth reading— at the very least, you get the thrust of his book without the plodding prose.

I don't mean to rain on the parade of folks acquiring customers/users/fans through social media. But at the end of the day, I think we have a chance to find something in this global interconnected weaving of life streams that is a lot richer than the next turn of direct marketing. And if that is the case, maybe now is a good time to slow down, get off the junkfood, and reassess what we what to make of it all.

Let's put this collective cognitive surplus to good use!