Will Baby Boomers kill Facebook? Will Facebook kill them back?

Deborah Rogers, professor of English at the University of Maine, shares some provocative thoughts about Facebook in “I poke dead people: The paradox of Facebook”  on The Times (i.e., of London) Higher Education website. One of the things she wonders about is the likelihood that the arrival of droves of overweight bleached blondes in mom jeans and dorky forty-something white guys will devalue the digital real estate. When they start showing up on Facebook, the cool kids say “there goes the neighborhood,” and look for a new place to hang. Even if that doesn’t happen, Rogers is fairly confident that the curious form of interaction on social networks will make us somehow less human. She sees evidence of this in how Facebook deals with, among other things, death. Below are a  few choice quotations to whet your appetite:

Even as it facilitates our ability to connect, the collective social-networking culture changes our way of thinking about everything from friendship to death. And not in a good way. As a technological medium that fetishises individualism, Facebook invites disaster.

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Facebook redefines what it means to connect to each other and provides a huge audience for self-absorption. Nothing is insignificant. Everyone wants to know everything about us, all the time. In the minutiae that mark the triteness of an inherently boring everyday life, we may recognise our own situation. Facebook’s fixation on individualism makes ordinary people feel important enough to warrant such attention – or inconsequential enough to need to document every aspect of their existence. The trope for this exhibitionism may be outing ourselves – and everyone we know.

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…the medium fails to allay our sense of despair and loneliness. For example, several months ago, Paul Zolezzi, an aspiring actor and model, hanged himself on the monkey bars in a Brooklyn playground. He had posted his suicide note on Facebook, where he said that he was “born in San Francisco, became a shooting star over everywhere, and ended his life in Brooklyn … And couldn’t have asked for more.” On Facebook, even suicide notes sound flippant. In fact, apparently assuming Zolezzi was joking, a friend commented on his Facebook page: “Are you dying? Or just staying in Brooklyn?”

Is conspicuous consumption being replaced by conspicuous expression?

I’m not sure I’m buying their argument in its entirety, but Stephen Linaweaver, Brad Bate and Michael Keating have written a provocative post on GOOD, “Conspicuous, but not Consuming,” that certainly merits discussion. Their theory is that social networks are filling the hole left in our lives by our inability to buy as much stuff as we used to. The lads write:

…”conspicuous consumption’ is being replaced by “conspicuous expression” as the driver of identity. This new paradigm emphasizes the conspicuousness of ideas, interests, and opinions rather than accumulating more stuff than your neighbor. This is not insignificant. How billions choose to distinguish themselves from one another will be just as important to global sustainability as how they power their homes, what they eat, and how they commute to work, making online social networking a critical “leapfrog” technology in the developing world and a surprisingly powerful source of behavioral change in the developed world.

Are Facebook and Twitter the medicine that will cure our addiction to acquiring things? Let’s wait a bit before we draw that as a final conclusion. An enormous preponderance of the self-expression on social networks winds up like the proverbial tree that falls in the forest. Not a sound is made. Nor am I certain that 65-inch HD TVs will lose their allure because people will choose instead to forsake them and turn to the fleeting rewards of digital egotism. Nevertheless, in the short term at least, it does seem as if many are amusing themselves in a down economy by taking refuge in the social networks and doing what Ken Kesey used to refer to as “starring in their own movies.”

Facebook app developers are getting rich and you’re not. Neither is Facebook.

You may have seen it reported yesterday that the pallid, painfully thin man-boys developing Facebook apps in their mildewed geek caves may very well make more money than Facebook itself in 2009. $500 million is a figure that has been bandied about. That this is even possible is yet another testament to the fact that Mark Zuckerberg cannot manage his way out of a wet paper bag. But let us not expend our energies kicking Mr. Zuckerberg in the stomach. Plenty of time for that later. Instead, let’s take a look at exactly what sort of Facebook apps we’re talking about.

TechCrunch has posted a story and lovely video that explains all.  Examine them and then tear at your flesh with your bare hands in anguish that you did not come up with the ideas first.

A Facebook Haggadah, a Twitter Passion Play and the Beginning of the Post-Absurdist Era

Last week someone sent me the story of Passover as explained by Facebook. It was intended to be amusing, and I suppose it succeeded in a limited way. There are status updates from Elijah on his tipsiness, a list of “25 things you don’t know about me” by God, etc. I gave it a quick glance and then didn’t think much more about it. Then today I read in the Telegraph of London that Trinity Church, the oldest Church in New York (which also occupies the oldest building in New York) has used Twitter to tell the story of the Passion 140 characters at a time. This was not an attempt at comedy. The church was trying to connect with young people by using new technology to tell an ancient story that is one of the cornerstones of Judeo-Christian civilization.

My immediate thought upon reading this was that absurdist expression is no longer possible. Satire and gospel have become indistinguishable. How can we reduce the central mythology of western civilizaton to a handful of Tweets? How can we not do it if we want the mythology to remain relevant to people whose attention spans are measured in fractions of a second? What’s more, if the most sacred texts of a civilization cannot resist being rendered by technology not to paragraphs or sentences but to mere utterances, what chance does the lowly advertising business have to cling to any form of articulate communication in the coming years?

In a documentary made to promote Monty Python’s Life of Brian, John Cleese ridiculed American Terry Gilliam’s limited vocabulary. Cleese claimed there were only two possible responses from Gilliam regardless of the stimulus to which he was exposed: “Hey man, I really like that” or “hey man, that really pisses me off.” Is this where our use of language is headed? Does it create a business opportunity to start “the next thing” after Twitter–something that reduces all human expression to either “like it” or “pisses me off”? Are indecipherable grunts and dumb shows the next (or last) stops on this ever-narrowing road? 

I am worried, not as an advertising professional but as a human being. Advertisers can and will concoct a new semiotic system to sell floor wax without verbs. What I’m less confident of is the next generation’s ability to squeeze Ulysses from an eyedropper.

Increase your productivity. Screw around on Facebook and YouTube at work.

Techdirt reports that people who access sites like Facebook and YouTube at work are actually more productive than their co-workers who don’t. This has something to do with our need for occasional mental breaks or some such. 

This being the case, I invite you to send your personal productivity through the roof by watching this very strange video of Andy Kaufman appearing on the David Letterman show on June 24th 1980. Had Kaufman lived, his videos could have single-handedly powered the global economy out of this recession without breaking a sweat. We shall not see his like again.

Want to visualize your Facebook network? Admit it, you’ve got nothing better to do.

Bernie Hogan has come up with a nifty little application that will create network matrices of your friends on Facebook. Kind of a nice way to visualize the circles, rhombuses and trapezoids in which you move.

Once you’ve created your matrices, the next logical step is to figure out why you don’t have more friends. Fortunately, there’s an article in the Economist that will answer the question and more or less  absolve you from responsibility. (It’s your brain’s fault.)

Actually, this is all pretty good stuff for marketers to know in an age where more and more we will be counting on consumers to spread the word about our brands.

In the online world, the money isn’t always where you think it’s going to be.

Consider Ebay. It belongs among the giants of the online space. Yet if you believe what Jeff Segal says at breakingviews.com, (and I do) the real value in Ebay going forward is going to be its Paypal subsidiary. Ebay’s auction business is going nowhere; growth was at just 1% last year and lagged the online commerce industry as a whole. Paypal grew at a 26% clip in 2008. By 2011, Paypal will in all likelihood be worth more than its parent company (if you use the same earnings multiples as a competitor, Visa, though it is arguably worth of a higher multiplier). 

Think about Steve Jobs. He fouled out, struck out, and was caught looking at quite a few called third strikes before he got on a product development hot streak that lifted the company out of the doldrums. I think we can all agree that the Lisa and the Newton came up a little short.

Maybe it will work out the same way for Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg had better hope so, anyway. His company is struggling mightily to find a profitable business model. Yet as we speak, some tiny shops are clearing $700,000 a month based on the Facebook apps they have created. Maybe one of them will be the magic bullet. Or perhaps, before he figures out what the magic bullet is, Zuckerberg will quit and run against Meg Whitman for governor of California. Stranger things have happened. Look who the governor is now.

Does social networking make you feel lonely?

  On the remote chance that  you’ve let your subscription to Biologist magazine lapse, here’s a link to an article by Aric Sigman, “Well Connected? The Biological Impact of Social Networking.”  It won’t make you feel any better, but it will help explain the science behind that empty feeling you get when you realize you’re sitting by yourself in a darkened apartment in front of your Facebook page on Saturday night.

Note to Mark Zuckerberg: Provoking 175 million people is a bad idea.

Mark Zuckerberg should count himself lucky that people don’t pay to use Facebook. If they did, the company would already be in ruins. The brazenness of the digital rights grab it recently tried to effect with a new terms of service agreement was worthy of Hugo Chavez. Ham-fisted, short-sighted and stupid. 

Facebook, which has 175 million users, should consider itself blessed not to be held to the standards of a real company that generates enough revenue to justify its market valuation, which for reasons that are unclear is in the billions of dollars.* As a result, most users will probably give it a second chance.

But how many second chances will Zuckerberg get? This is not the first example of bumbling management in Facebook’s short history. The introduction of Beacon, to name one example, sparked enormous protests about privacy concerns.

All Zuckerberg needs to do is look over his shoulder at MySpace, which is hemorrhaging users, to see that the leadership position in the social network space can be evanescent. Every cock-up sends more people to Beebo, more people to Orkut, more people to dozens of other sites whose owners are breathing hard at the prospect of overtaking Facebook.

Perhaps the most significant lesson Zuckerberg can learn is contained in the very name of MySpace. It beautifully stated the purpose and promise of the site and indeed the whole social networking phenomenon. The worst mistake he can make with Facebook–and he seems intent on making it again and again–is to treat it like HisSpace.

* I don’t want to veer off into a blood-and-guts discussion of the market value of Facebook, but I am willing to bet it will wind up being a good deal less than its current investors would hope. This is largely because any monetization strategy will introduce a level of brand presence into the site that will cause users to flee for “purer” social networking alternatives.

It turns out that, yes, Facebook is a little like a communicable disease

 

If you are on Facebook, you have doubtless been battered about the head and shoulders repeatedly by a questionnaire called “25 random things about me.” The idea is that you list said 25 things, forward them to 25 friends, who are instructed to do the same bloody thing. I leave it to you to work out for yourselves whether this pyramid scheme is better or worse that the one perpetrated by Bernie Madoff. In any case here’s an recent article from Slate in which a fellow called Chris Wilson examines the phenomenal evolution and spread of this questionnaire in an entertaining though not altogether rigorous way (despite the fact that he enlists help from a University of Texas professor who tracks the spread of infectious diseases for a living). Nevertheless, you may still glean a few insights about how content spreads virally (dread word) in the online space and how quickly it can peter out. 

P.S. Anyone who asks me to list 25 random things about myself will be ignored.