Are We Lowering Content Standards?

In a recent post on Digital B2B Marketing  by Eric Wittlake, he posed the opinion that Social Media was causing people to share lower quality content as a result of trying to meet the demand for a higher quantity of posts. At first I agreed with Mr. Wittlake, but as I toyed with the concept in my head I began to question the theory.

It seems that with the increased visibility and reach provided by social media that allows one user to have their content be viewed by untold amounts of people that they might think twice about the quality of what they are sharing. It is true that I am sure there are people out there, even me I am sure, who occasionally share a peace of content that doesn’t quite meet par, but to say that social media is lowering the quality of content all together is crazy.

There is too much high quality content to say that the standard has been lowered. Experts like Kyle Lacy, Doug Karr, Pete Cashmore, even Eric Wittlake and many many more share high quality content every day and I am not talking about sharing one of their personal blogs a day I mean sharing eight different articles from eight different blogs ALL of the highest quality. This is what causes me to believe social media is not lowering content quality. 

No, instead social media is just allowing lower quality content to be seen.

If you think that silly jokers weren’t trying to get crappy content published prior to social media then you are a silly joker yourself. They were mailing the crap to their family, friends, and publishers all trying to get someone to read them, but their stuff was not being shared to the masses because there was not efficient means of doing so.

So… to sum up I don’t agree that the quality of content is lowering, not even a little. What I do think is that most of quality of content being shared is rising, but social media is allowing content of poorer quality to be made visible and if a few crappy blog posts are the cost of all the benefits, well… I am willing to pay it.