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The Era of Facebook Is an Anomaly
An anonymous reader writes "Speaking to The Verge, author and Microsoft Researcher Danah Boyd put words to a feeling I've had about Facebook and other social networking sites for a while, now: 'The era of Facebook is an anomaly.' She continues, 'The idea of everybody going to one site is just weird. Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space. Fragmentation is a more natural state of being. Is your social dynamic interest-driven or is it friendship-driven? Are you going there because there's this place where other folks are really into anime, or is this the place you're going because it's where your pals from school are hanging out? That first [question] is a driving function.' Personally, I hope this idea continues to propagate — it's always seemed odd that our social network identities are locked into certain websites. Imagine being a Comcast customer and being unable to email somebody using Time Warner, or a T-Mobile subscriber who can't call somebody who's on Verizon. Why do we allow this with our social networks?"
"None ever used this thing that wasn't available before, therefore (loads of rationalizations)"
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
God damn internet is anomaly. Facebook won't last long anyways.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Phone system?
-Dave
No, the phone system is a network of compatible and standardized endpoints. No one really cares how they are connected, just like no one would care if Facebook didn't use the internet. I think the phone system is a pretty good example.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Right or wrong, the reason a large site like Facebook stays large as most people dont want to have to go different places to do what amounts to the same thing.
Would you rather go to 10 friends house each week for 30 minutes each, or everyone hang out at one for the afternoon? Most people would not choose all the running around.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Imagine being a subscriber of AOL, PC-Link, Compuserve, Prodigy, Delphi, or GEnie, and not being able to send messages to customers of other services.
It has already happened once, and we are repeating it.
A social network is only relevant if it is "relevant" (aka if it appeases your social needs). Usually this requires a clear market winner. That's how we got CD vs DAT, VHS vs BetaMax and BluRay vs HD-DVD.
Facebook is not a place that everyone goes to. It is merely a hosting platform where people create zillions (of partially overlapping) "places" that they go to. Those millions of people are not on your Friends list. Facebook is millions of "places", not one. (However, George Takei's page is indeed the one single place in the world where everyone goes. But just for his stuff; nobody reads the comments.) As for Facebook "bombarding your news feed with useless information 24x7", ummm, that doesn't happen to me. Get a life?
> Is your social dynamic interest-driven or is it friendship-driven? Are you going there because there's this place where other folks are really into anime, or is this the place you're going because it's where your pals from school are hanging out?
I believe those different groups are called "social circles", and Facebook started supporting the concept in 2011, after Google+ made it central to their interface. Facebook is the MEDIUM for different grugroups to communicate. Facebook is not the group.
Yes, it would be weird if every group gathered at the same physical location. It would not be weird if they all drove in cars to get there. Facebook isn't a physical space that crams everyone together. It's a method of getting to different groups a person belongs to.
And why would I want to verify my identity? Last time I checked I was pretty sure that I was myself, no need to verify anything.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Right. I remember those days. It was back when everyone was on Yahoo!What made Yahoo! chat rooms work was that you could go there and find people
I really doubt that. Newsgroups are as old as the internet itself. And talkd and IRC are also quite old. Waaaay before Yahoo.
What makes Facebook work is that is where everyone is now.
True.
This is called "network effect"
This is EXACTLY what you want from a social network. Or you'd have skype, google talk and the remaining crap to talk with people. A niche network - the shit G+ was catering to when it was launched (by arrogant nerds for nerds) - will not fly. Internet IS NOT for the elite. And Facebook understands that.
>"author and Microsoft Researcher Danah Boyd [...] Imagine being a Comcast customer and being unable to email somebody using Time Warner, or a T-Mobile subscriber who can't call somebody who's on Verizon. Why do we allow this with our social networks?"
That's a good question, Ms. "Microsoft researcher". Perhaps you can imagine a world where people can exchange documents freely and accurately without proprietary software like MS-Word. Or a world where consumers can put any OS they want on any computer without MS working with vendors to try and block them at the BIOS level. Or imagine people sharing calendar events easily without using MS's Exchange/Outlook formats. MS tried to hijack the web with IE (and did so successfully for years), and lied about their competitors to prevent diversity, locked out vendors from including Linux or other FOSS on machines, corrupted exported filters to make sure files to/from competitors would be partially broken. And the list goes on and on. Microsoft has been responsible for more lock-in and anti-compatibility than any other tech company, so perhaps I find it ironic that someone from Microsoft would ask us to imagine any kind of world of incompatibility.
lockin/networkeffect is so much easier a business model than competing based on excellence.
it's an interesting question to ponder: at what level of clue do customers begin to care? does the mass market ever reach that level? implicitly, sure - a service won't succeed which can't interoperate at least well enough. but how many customers really understand the concept of protocol or API - understand it well enough to realize that it permits vendor-independent services?
Facebook isn't a social meeting place, it's a communications platform that also happens to let you hang a sign on the door that everyone can see.
That's why they bought whatsapp, that's why they have all of the various tools to send and archive messages and to let you carve up the 'social space' of who you talk to.
There are lots of shady things they are up to as well,
>Why do we allow this with our social networks?"
Whey do we let countries control their TLD's and phone exchanges and physical mail system? You don't have to use facebook to talk to anybody, there are other forms of communication. But if you want to use the facebook communication system then you have to use Facebook. If it becomes big enough, important enough and persistent enough then the government will step in to regulate it. But it's also possible facebook will go the way of the dodo bird in a couple of years when people get sick of all the stuff facebook ends up doing to try and make money.
"Brains process patterns. Proximity (specially multi-sensorial) is a pattern, much more fullfilling than online experiences..."
I wouldn't be so sure about assigning fulfillment levels there. Recent studies have shown that folks get the same "brain happy" from regularly watching the same TV shows with familiar characters as they do from spending time with friends in real life. Us assigning greater benefit to doing so with real people as opposed to television characters is purely a societal imposition, not inherent in our brain chemistry.
That said, because such a large potion of folks use Facebook, anyone who tries to peg it a certain way or interpret it to present one point of view to "understand" simply is grasping at straws. Facebook is a platform, used in many different ways. It's like generalizing people who "go to the shopping mall". Businesses use it to advertise. People use it for social mini blogging. To a large number, it's simply the 21st century equivalent of what people used to keep address books for. If you want to stay in contact with someone, it's far easier to find them on Facebook than share other (often transient) information like cell phone numbers, addresses, even emails. It's also a way to control access - if you use the tools FB gives you to do so.
I don't go on Facebook every day, or even every week sometimes. But I know how to find the people in my life, many of whom - particularly from high school, college, and former workplaces - I likely would have never known how to contact again when I was thinking of them and wanted to say hello. Or ask a question. Or any number of things that people reach out for. It's not the medium, it's the capability to have a master list of everyone you know (or care to keep connected with). That's it's staying power - and other little services come and go, but it's doubtful any other single entity will be able to hit the right time like FB did and capture this kind of audience again.
"Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space."
Ok, late 80s, to mid 90s: usenet.
"Fragmentation is a more natural state of being."
Bears are natural. Also, botulotoxin and cyanide. Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's beneficial to you or good for you.
Need Mercedes parts ?
"Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space."
TV
Radio
Newspaper
There's one mega site "everybody" uses, just like how there used to be one mega network "everybody" watched (NBC) and one mega network "everybody" listened to (NBC again under RCA), etc.
The only thing different with social media is that since people are providing their own shit as content, they end up more closely tied to a particular site because of its content than they were with TV, radio, newspapers, bards, etc. That said, Facebook may be a behemoth but it's certainly not the only behemoth - there's Twitter and Youtube, for example. "everybody" is on Twitter, and "everybody" watches videos on Youtube.
> by leaving your comfort zone.
How is socializing with other members of your faith leaving your comfort zone? Church IS your comfort zone. So is the marketplace where you gather with FRIENDS.
>The real anomaly is in the walls that keep us from knowing each other.
Like the one that surrounds facebook, and the walls within facebook that prevent certain interactions between its members.
Yes, Facebook is the hosting platform, just as email once existed within computers and didn't travel between them. We don't yet have a Social Media Transport Protocol that allows peering between providers, but one day we will, and Facebook will follow AOL & CompuServe to the big walled garden in the sky. But, IMHO, that day is not in the near future.
Two words: Network effects.
Facebook succeeds not because it's anything special, but because a critical mass of the population uses it, and each person can independently decide the shape of their "community". If I meet someone new in the real world, and want to keep up with what's going on in their life, odds are we're both on Facebook. Nobody else offers that. A new competitor could start that was 100x better than Facebook in every technological way, but until they reached a critical mass of users nobody would care.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.