Information gets a new life with social media because you get a lot more personalized and user generated content. Information is now possibly more raw, honest and closer to the heart of those which are generating the content, the reason for this is that people are sharing this 'new' information usually along the lines of areas that information that matters to them most.
*I think* Social media certainly aids to break down barriers that exist between businesses and customers -cuts through some red tape if you will. For this it takes bold initiative and some risk for businesses to expose themselves in this way (opening themselves to honest feedback from customers). On a personal note: I recently made a business transaction in order to make a purchase from a purely online store. I did not know a lot about this store other than its website and I noticed that it had a facebook page and I saw that it had a good amount of "friends" and positive feedback. So I decided to proceed with my purchase. However to cut a long story short the business transaction went sour and the store did not provide the services that it had promised. At the very least I felt the need to provide some constructive criticism to the organisation and I actually decided to do this via email and not make it public by doing so on their facebook page. But you can see where the opportunity exists where institutions could be embarrassed publicly through social media technologies.
Regarding breaking down the barriers you would think that it would be even more difficult to do this with the relationships between the government and citizens due to strict regulations however the government are keen to take advantage of the web 2.0 revolution and are certainly not afraid of becoming more flexible and they are certainly developing a greater online presence and availability improving communication with regular citizens. Although let's hope that the governments adoption and acceptance of web 2.0 is not just internalised in improving government procedures but actually reaches out to the regular citizens, (who can respond in kind).
The report can be found at: Government web 2.0 report
It was enlightening in the social media slideshare presentation located at Social media to see that the focus of web 3.0 will be centred around the idea of "live" that is a real time extension of the web 2.0 focus which is collaboration. Moreover after reading the statistics and finding the growth of internet use and TV watching, information certainly does have a new life and since in web 2.0 it focuses on community it can be extremely addictive for many. On a personal note: I am a little concerned that our society is spending too much time being wired and I think that each new generation will find it much more difficult to unplug and amongst the positive benefits of social media there are serious dangers as well.
