Gijs van Dam

In the sixties the philosopher Thomas Kuhn came up with the idea that science doesn't progress gradually by a linear and continuous accumulation of bits of knowledge, but that regularly, scientific revolutions broke out that drastically threw over the dominant theories within a certain field of science. Kuhn coined the term "paradigm shifts" for these revolutions.

According to Kuhn these paradigm shifts took place when the dominant theory, or the central paradigm as he called it, was in crisis. A crisis consisted of a growing amount of observations that were irreconcilable with what the central paradigm dictated. Those anomalies made it necessary for a new central paradigm to be constructed that dealt with both the old observations and the anomalies.

When such a thing happened, science acted like a person who looks at one of those dual-aspect optical illusions, like the picture that is both an old woman and a young girl. The interpretation of such an image suddenly snaps from one way of viewing it to the other way of viewing it and it's impossible to see both interpretations at the same time.

Kuhn's ideas were really popular in the sixties, but soon encountered some problems. For starters, nobody had ever observed a paradigm shift. Even Galileo and Newton turned out to be revisionists rather than revolutionaries. Before soon every theory with the smallest of impacts on science was called a paradigm shift, which made the term meaningless. Kuhn's observations where interesting and of importance, but in the end his model had to be replaced by a model that emphasized the gradual development of science. Eventually even Kuhn had to admit that his original model was too limited.

But the damage was done, an empty term without meaning was born. Empty terms without meaning are the realm of marketing managers, and they dived into it like maggots into a carcass. This led Larry Trask to urge never to us the term again in his book "Mind the Gaffe". But if we search on the terms "social media" and "paradigm shift" we can easily assess that people didn't listen to Larry.

The news surrounding social media has stripped the term paradigm shift of any meaning as far as this was still possible, to the point were it physically hurts to see it used. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Social Media in general: It's not a revolution, it's not a paradigm shift. These are the last ones of a series of gradual and connected developments that originated from the construction of ARPANET. Undoubtedly even the engineers from which brains ARPANET sprouted, gradually built upon what they knew.

Labeling every development with any impact on the web as being a paradigm shift or a revolution, doesn't do justice to the context of those developments. The historian Robert Darnton wrote: "The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet." It's even worse: "The marvels of communication technology in the present follow each other in such a rapid pace that we already have seem to forget where we were 10 years ago. This can only lead to really bad decision making on the use of social media.