A Tale of Two Posts
July 7th, 2009 |- ReadWriteWeb, via iStrategyLabs:
- Grant McCracken (who mined a database of “politicians, captains of industry, heads of cultural institutions, celebrities, journalists, and academics” and was stunned by their collective lack of Facebook presence):
How fickle are kids these days? Just when all the grown ups started figuring out Facebook, college and high school users have declined in absolute number by 20% and 15% respectively in a mere six months, according to estimates Facebook provides to advertisers that were archived for tracking by an outside firm. Facebook users aged 55 and over have skyrocketed from under 1 million to nearly six million in the same time period.
Or maybe they are MFFB (missing from Facebook) on purpose. Maybe, they don’t believe in Facebook. They don’t believe in social networking in the digital age. It is possible for intelligent people to take this position. Recently I heard four people at a big time advertising age try to persuade me that Facebook is really just for kids, that it’s a passing fancy, that not very far from now it will disappear from fashion. Their position: Ignore Facebook. It will go away.
I can’t tell you how embarrassing this is for an anthropologist to listen to. I have done the research, and this much is clear. Facebook is here to stay. It has changed selfhood and the social world permanently. (One example: millennials are hard to manage these days because the social network has replaced the corporation has their primary “safety net.” Now that they have Facebook, a job at a big corporation matters much less.) Facebook has changed the structural properties of our culture. We can ignore it. It will not go away.
As the former article points out, Facebook use is still increasing among all age groups. It’s just that fewer seem to identify as high school and college students. There’s no indication of how this identification is measured (Primary network? Any academic network? Self-reported educational status in the profile?). And although 35% of all Facebook users are under the age of 25, 79% of users in this dataset have a current enrollment of “unknown.” Far too many methodological questions to qualify as a substantive finding, much less to justify the stereotypical invocation of young “fickle” whippersnappers.
I think McCracken, though, misses the forest for the trees. Whatever alterations to self, society, and culture have resulted from Facebook are not unique to Facebook. They are ultimately a product and component part of a larger revolution in digitally mediated communication. Young people can and will abandon Facebook if sufficiently alienated (see: Friendster) or attracted to a more innovative competitor (see: MySpace). They are not fickle, but the particular forms and shapes of this larger social trend are. The stubborn advertisers may be able to ignore Facebook if it goes the way of its predecessors, but not if Facebook is able to achieve a stable presence like Microsoft or Google, and they can’t ignore the communicative consequences of this digitally mediated revolution.
Regardless, with SNSs having emerged from subcultural obscurity only a few years ago, MySpace having been dominant 18 months ago, and Facebook having grown from 42 million to 72 million U.S. users in the past 6 months, it seems rash to attempt to articulate any more than the broadest outlines of social change at the moment. As with historical events, the most compelling narratives will only emerge several years after the effects reverberate through society. As sudden and unpredictable as the rise of SNSs have been, they are likely to be understood only in the context of future developments as far beyond the event horizon now as MySpace and Facebook were in 2002.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
