We’ve all heard a lot of debate lately about whether social media is an evolution or a revolution. Lots of statistical analysis about the relative growth rates of Facebook and Twitter and the slowing of uptake for both.

Look at it this way and social media inevitably becomes evolution, as social media researcher Josh Chasin convincingly argues here.

But I think we lose sight of the revolution by looking at social media in isolation. Social media is tightly tied to something that is undergoing a revolution right now: media. We’re all looking for the revolution to happen within the tools, but where the revolution is occurring is in the content that feeds those tools. We all like to share relevant, credible content through social media, and until now, most of that content has come through traditional media sources—mostly print publications that are pretending to have a viable business model online.

The destructive side of revolutions
We like to look for constructive creation from our revolutions. As Americans, we think back to the American Revolution as a constructive spark that led to a powerful nation instead of focusing on the decades of weak, chaotic, violent, and ineffective government that actually followed it—and that nearly collapsed many times.

Today’s real media revolution is in its destructive and chaotic period. Our traditional business model for media is imploding. Advertising-supported media is becoming an unsustainable business. There won’t be nearly as much to link to through Twitter in the coming years, and that’s the revolutionary subtext that’s going on behind the evolution of Web 2.0. What happens as thousands of small and medium-sized newspapers and magazines disappear? How does social media fill that void? Will it be replaced by spending our time reading Shaq’s tweets?

The five percent of Twitterers who actively use it are probably the only ones who are going to try to fill this void with something useful. In tracking B2B marketing through Twitter, I find a ton of great content being shared through blogs whose creators have already swamped the output of trade magazines. But what about the rest of social media’s audience?

Social media tools are imperfect for informing people
This is where the constructive part of the revolution will come. What thoughtful readers like about a good publication is that it filters out all the noise and it tells readers when they know enough to move on. You reach the last page of the newspaper and you’re done for the day. You realize that you don’t know everything, but you can walk away knowing that the day’s events haven’t totally escaped you. Social media doesn’t do that for us right now. Twitter is literally an endless stream of information, much of it repetitive. The tools are imperfect for informing us.

But as the traditional tools for informing us disappear, we need social media to play a role in rebuilding the channel of informed public opinion that is being destroyed right now. This is no evolution.

But social media tools can alter relationships
I keep coming back to how social media tools have the power to reshape relationships, much as the American Revolution (eventually, many years later) reshaped the relationship between a government and its people. That’s why I’m so intrigued by the viral relationship model invented by Twitter.  The ability to follow someone (offline I think we call it stalking) is perhaps Twitter’s most powerful feature. This idea of viral relationship building (following followers of others) is what Facebook and MySpace look at and get really jealous about. They’re stuck in the model of making relationships the old fashioned way: through permission-based trust and experience. Twitter has created a sandbox where those rules are mitigated by technology and people are liking it because they know everyone else is (or should be) playing by the same rules.

In this sense, I think the comparisons between Twitter and Facebook are less valid than those between Twitter and another phenomenon that changed the way we relate to each other: eBay. You can’t deny that eBay is a revolution. Tens of thousands of people make their primary living from it now on a global basis. Twitter has all sorts of options for expanding based on the viral relationship model it has created. Sure, now it’s 140-character updates, but the viral social model has potential for other things, too, including content creation (not just sharing).

When does social media take on a social responsibility?
So at what point do we begin ascribing the same responsibility to social media that we have to traditional print and TV media: that of educating and informing the public? It sounds crazy, but at some point (if not already) many people are getting most of their information through these social media channels. At what point does Twitter stop Twittering about its latest features and start offering public service announcements? Probably not anytime soon, because Twitter’s business model isn’t any more certain that traditional media’s is right now. Someone else may come up with a way to make money from the viral relationship model that Twitter pioneered and we may not even remember the name in a few years. Sounds like a revolution to me.

Meanwhile, a new revenue giant has emerged in social media for the same reason that the old media empires emerged back in the 19th and 20th centuries: it can charge a tax. Of course, I’m talking about Google, which sucks cash out of businesses just like the newspapers and magazines used to. Businesses believe they have nowhere else to go to get their messages out other than through Google paid search, so they pay through the nose for it, just like advertisers used to with newspapers and magazines. So when do we stop viewing Google as a software company and start viewing it as a media titan with a responsibility to the public? When does Google stop linking to the New York Times (and sucking all of the paid search revenue that the Times would get if people just went to the site instead) and start building its own news division, just like the TV networks did in the 50s?

Sounds nuts, right? But if you’re going to be the source where everyone gets their information, you have some responsibility to those people at some point don’t you? As a people (and as a government) we’ve certainly had that expectation of media empires in the past.

What’s happening here is that we are completely altering the relationship between media consumers and media producers. Social media is part of that because it is altering the relationships that people have with each other online. Put those two things together and you have a revolution. We are in the chaotic period where the walls have come down and no one’s quite sure where or how the new ones will go up. Sure sounds like a revolution to me.

What do you think?