Social media = conversational media

It's great to have a dedicated group of followers online - until the audience gets so big that the conversation stops. When it comes to your social network, bigger is better. Or so we're told. The more followers and friends you have, the more awsome and important you are. When you go from having a few hundred Twitter followers to ten thousand, something unexpected happens : Social nerworking starts to break down. Why ? Because socializing doesn't scale. At a few hundred or few thousands followers, they're having fun - but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It's no longer a bantering process of thinking and living our loud. It become old-fashioned broadcasting. Technically speaking online social-networking tools ought to be great at fostering these sort of cluters. Blogs, Twitter and Facebook are conversational media. Clive Thompson in In Praise of Obscurity, Wire, Feb. 2010 (p.30).