Does Social Media really destroy hierarchies or silos?

I’ve been back reading through blogs, presentations, articles, tweets and well just about every thing I can manage over the last week to resolve questions in my head as to why so many Social Media “Experts” or “Gurus” seem to think of social media as breaking down walled gardens (silos) and destroying hierarchies inherent in much of culture, business and online systems – and that this is a good thing or indeed what is actually happening?

As yet I am not yet convinced I have a sound argument for their thinking other than to subvert process is human and that many social media tools provide an path or opportunity to do just that. 

Hierarchies are great, they provide control, a sense of order to things.  They have a very sound place in life.  Indeed as do silos of information, segmentation provides a wealth of benefits from privacy to ease of management.

It struck me late last night that I can draw a direct parallel between social media and a lot of the work I have been involved with over the last 13 years in data navigation. Back in the day pretty well all data was stored in some form of relational database modelled hierarchically.  This was, as mentioned, great for control but lousy for integrating multiple and disparate data sources (which led to a whole industry built on assimilation – data warehousing).  Worse still, hierarchically modelled data was a nightmare to navigate. 

Let me provide a simile.

In an organisation built upon traditional management structures with departments and the like, rigid reporting lines often make for poor communication channels and  awkward cross department interactions.  Those very structures designed to provide human resource control actually prevent humans from doing what humans do best – connecting.  How on Earth does one quickly & easily connect to the right person in another area of the company for help when constrained into following hierarchical chains of reporting?  This has been long recognised and working groups, committees and project focussed groups containing staff from across  a number of departments or skill bases are commonplace nowadays.

Dr Karen Stephenson, a corporate anthropologist and lauded as a pioneer and "leader in the growing field of social-network business consultants” (Business 2.0 2006), and her company NetForm have been publishing work on social network (think social graph web peoples) analysis for years which quite clearly shows that no matter how one tries to enforce structure on people informal networks of people will emerge – normally based around a specific context.  Yet the structure, the hierarchy prevails

So back to social media.  Are the tools of which social media experts talk not just enabling this networking behaviour, by providing easier more human, more informal navigation (for a particular task or context) across the hierarchies or silos? This to me makes far more sense than any talk of the structures being destroyed.