In an article, "Facebook Grows Up", from the August 2007 Newsweek Magazine, Steven Levy analyzes the effect of social media, specifically Facebook, on digital society and the business world.
I remember the first big push for Facebook accounts when I was a freshman in the dorms here at UC Irvine. The site was just getting off the ground, and I was just getting acclimated into the blogging culture. My Xanga blog, as well as my Myspace account were as fresh as my crisp, new first set of extra-long twin sheets. When Facebook became popularized, I relished in the exclusive feeling I got from knowing it was strictly a college network. After its launch, Facebook morphed into a rocket soaring through the greater universe, taking with it high school teens and post-college career types, as well as its original university demographic. For many of its users, Facebook's role is a force that, like it or not, rules their lives as an undeniable addiction, or even a hyper-religious ritual.
Going along with the sacred quality I quickly afforded to Facebook, I was particularly upset when the site opened up to non-university students. Facebook was like Smeagol's "precious" in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and we were fighting for the privilege of calling it our own. I was admittedly a bit annoyed that high school seniors who had just received their college acceptance letters had jumped right on board. We, the "collegiate elite", weren't all that special anymore. We are all special now... Levy writes: "[Facebook's] people claim that more than half its 35 million active users are not college students, and that by the end of this year less than 30% of Facebook users will sport college IDs" (42). High school students are on Facebook now. Parents are on Facebook now. And it should come as no surprise that big businesses as well as budding business opportunities are all over Facebook now. The network is an ever-growing spider web in which to capture us: not just in the form of hundreds of snapshots or profile blurbs, but as food for the giant spider of advertising.
We make the advertiser's jobs easier for them, if you think about it. Not until a few months ago, and until I took this class have I really thought about what kind of people have access to my profile, and what they might be doing with it.
Facebook's current price tag is about seven or eight billion bucks, which rivals the value of MTV, according to some recent reports. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook at the age of nineteen, says, "Facebook is (1) not a social-networking site but a 'utility', a tool to facilitate the information flow between users and their compatriots, family members and professional connections; (2) not just for college students, and (3) a world-changing idea of unlimited potential" (42). It is interesting to consider his vision for the site, which most other people would readily call a social-networking site. What interests me is the notion of its unlimited potential.
One of my friends, Matt, and I had a conversation one night about Facebook's ultimate direction. Although I do not know his sources, he claims that one of Facebook's final goals is to let the internet technology auto-generate news stories of events. The idea of Facebook as a tool for building what Zuckerberg calls a "social graph" is right along these lines. Matt said that the mini-feed was only the beginning, that one day a short article could form from a cyber composite of the event invite, all related photos, notes and attendee comments/reviews. One day, my friend was so convinced, we would not have to remember what happened at that crazy concert or party on Friday night. Facebook would generate the memories for us. And furthermore, it would offer all possible angles and experiences from all those remotely involved.
Does anyone feel threatened by that possibility? I do.
Facebook is, perhaps, a self-imposed Big-Brother system that is cleverly disguised as fun. And pretty soon, it will claim all of us. Or at least that's what the main players in Facebook would like to happen. Those vampires...they got me!
"Karel Baloun, an engineer who worked at Facebook until last year, recalls vividly the baldly stated prediction of one of the company's cofounders: 'In five years...we'll have everybody on the planet on Facebook", Levy reports (42). (Side note: never mind those technologically deficient countries, shall we...but we'll get to the global technological divide at a later date.)
The site is catching like wild fire in Canada and in London, primarily, and is steadily gaining popularity among other places around the world (45). Is it not so far off to say that the developed nations of the world will have most of their population (young and professional alike) aboard the Facebook train in five years time? I'm still doubtful. Zuckerberg is soon to launch Facebook in other languages, but even still, I don't see my parents' generation signing up. My mom only occasionally enjoys utilizing her children's Facebook and Myspace profiles because they allow her to search for estranged friends and relatives' kids ("I want to see how they look like now," she says.)
David Rodnitzky, a marketing executive in San Francisco, criticizes some of the new applications on Facebook as not being the best way to interact in the 'grown-up' environment. Business colleagues, he said, shouldn't ask personal questions on the "My Questions" applications, or head-butt their bosses on "Super-Poke" (45). There's the personal issue of settling down and wanting more private, intimate lives in the family or business sphere; then again, other family people are eager to post photos of their newborns, or advertise their new position at the office. It goes both ways.
One thing is clear, however. Facebook has changed and is continually changing the way we live. An author named Robert Putnam states that "Facebook was originally a classic 'alloy', bonding the Internet and the real world", but that now "it feels less rooted in real life"(46). That gives me something else to think about when I sickeningly recall how many times I log in daily: how rooted in real life am I?
But that reminds me...I'll go log in...right NOW!
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