"Social Media" is best considered, not in isolation, but as part of much larger technical and social movements (Trend Currents). Welcome to The New Normal: Networked Communications.
http://bit.ly/SMStartHere
8. Cultural Ubiquity Social networking is cutting across ALL areas of business (not just marketing), and the use of social networking in business is a subset of its broad use in general life and culture. It’s not going away!
9.
10.
11.
12. The Bottom Line: Then There were once many walls and gaps between most people – direct contact with people and information was severely limited and regularly mediated
17. So…Who is in Charge Now? These Trend Currents – and the digital tools that fuel them – make the growth of social media/networked communications into virtually every sphere an inevitability.