I’ve loved social media for years now, based solely on its own merits. The democratization of information (big words for big ideas) has been a critical factor for journalism, politics, and humanitarian efforts for anywhere between two and six years (I start counting at Howard Dean). It takes the dissemination of information partly out of the hands of the Big Guys (Media, Government) and gives it to everybody.*
But yeah, ok, so you see a picture of a plane in a river or you save people from earthquake rubble. Big deal. The biggest achievement of social media has yet to come: letting us know about the aliens. This is genuinely what I am the most excited for social media to bring to us.
See, every sci-fi geek since H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine (decent book; wouldn’t base a genre on it) has been waiting for the aliens to come, and every sci-fi geek since 1948 has known that when they do (or when the did), the government will (did) cover it up. Until now.
If aliens crash near, hover around, or otherwise come in contact with humans, it will be all over the social web. It will be like a virus (but the good kind; not the kind normally associated with alien invasions), first starting as a tweet along the lines of “Um. Aliens?” And then someone will retweet that, and then ten more people will retweet it, and so on. Then maybe it will trend. Then someone will post something to TwitPic, and that will trend. It will spread across Facebook, and only every fifteenth item in your news feed will be not about the aliens. Then CNN will pick it up and show five or six different cell phone videos. Then variants on this will dominate nine of the top ten trending topics (I’m certain something about Beyoncé will still be seven or eight), and it will be otherwise independently verified half a billion times over (that number is likely not an exaggeration, either).
Five days later, the government will reluctantly say something.
Ten years ago, this would not have been possible.
*99 times out of 100 this is a terrible, terrible thing.