I still hardly use Facebook. If I remember, I copy these posts onto my homepage. And if someone sends me a message, I try to reply. But being ‘the wrong side of 40’ most of my middle-aged friends still prefer email to social networking.
I used to console myself with the idea that Facebook is the past, and something new will soon step over the digital horizon. It seems I was wrong, and Facebook is actually the face of the future.
It’s not just that Facebook growth is still exponential (I don’t just mean large, I mean exponential: it’s rate of growth is going up; the number of active users doubled from 200 million last summer to this month’s 400 million). It’s that our personal identity, and our commercial identity, is becoming defined not by what we consume (shopping), or watch (TV), or search for (Google), but by what we connect with in real-time.
This is why mobile Facebook and all the new smartphone applications will shape the evolution of culture and human consciousness over the next decade. Blogging, by the way, is almost prehistoric by now.
David Rowan explains the background:
What we are witnessing is the ultimate battle for control of the internet. Google, employing the world’s smartest software engineers, has dominated the desktop-internet era for a decade through its unbeatable algorithm-based computing power. But now we’re into the mobile-internet era, Facebook intends to dominate by knowing what we are thinking, doing and intending to spend — wherever we happen to be. As Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg sees it, this “social graph”, built around our friends, family and colleagues, will determine how hundreds of millions of us decide on everything from holidays to cosmetic surgeons. And with Facebook the proprietary gatekeeper — its mobile-phone applications already attracting extraordinary engagement from members — that’s a potential advertiser proposition that Google can only dream of.
It’s not that Mr Zuckerberg is still only 25 and naively arrogant that annoys Google, nor that his company has enticed swaths of senior Google talent. It’s that Facebook’s fast-growing dominance of the “social” internet threatens its rival’s entire business model. If it can sell advertisers access not just to what you’re thinking, but to where you are, who you’re with and what you plan to do, Facebook’s revenues from individually targeted “behavioural” advertising could increase exponentially. And it knows it.
“Google is not representative of the future of technology in any way,” a Facebook veteran boasted to Wired recently. “Facebook is an advanced communications network enabling myriad communication forms. It almost doesn’t make sense to compare them.”
Mr Zuckerberg’s human-powered view of the internet also taps into our yearning, as social creatures, to climb Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to attain self-actualisation: of the 400 million active Facebook users (up from 200 million last summer), half log on in any given day; they share five billion pieces of content a week and upload more than three billion photos each month. On average, they spend more than 55 minutes a day on Facebook. Those who access it via their mobile devices are “twice as active”. Now do you see why the search gurus in Google’s Mountain View headquarters are so anxious?
Dear Fr Stephen,
Couldn’t find an email address for you but just wanted to contact you to say how much I enjoyed, (found interesting and inspiring) and felt challenged (in a positive way) by, your talk on Thérèse of Lisieux (for the benefit of others: http://bit.ly/aHCPij). Thank you.
Apologies for this comment being off-topic.
Best wishes + God Bless,
Edmond Mahony
Thanks Edmond – I’m glad it was helpful.
I know of several people who, like me, don’t use Facebook for the very reasons pointed out in David Rowan’s explanation. I don’t like the notion of my likes and dislikes being on show for the whole world to see; I dislike the thought of others, if ‘they’ be individuals or an organisation being able to use software to send my details to companies who can then send me advertisements based upon my preferences and, finally but foremost, perhaps because I too am the ‘wrong side of 40’, I prefer to e-mail on a regular basis those I actually know.
BBCi Player, The Virtual Revolution: Homo Interneticus?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00r3qhg/The_Virtual_Revolution_Homo_Interneticus/
Thanks for posting these. I haven’t been able to follow the series – but I’m trying to catch up now!
m