facebook as a cultural hype
There are hypes of different periodicities. Cultural shifts are among the slowest. (Quantitative traders are well aware of the fractal nature of cycles.)
Mark Zuckerberg is a serious man. He does not like hype. He prefers utility over coolness.
General opinion is that Facebook owns "the social layer" and Mark is connecting the world. But this is complete bullshit for anyone who knows a little bit of sociology.
Facebook does not own the social layer. It is the social layer who owns Facebook.
Mark may detest coolness, but the early adopters of social platforms are always among the youngsters and the youngsters care a lot about coolness. In fact, Facebook owes its wildfire growth among university campuses to its cool beginnings.
Now the youngsters have shifted to other platforms and Mark is going crazy realising that he will not be able to buy all these platforms off. (Public markets serve an enormously important social role: For a company like Snapchat, going public is the only option for realising value for its investors without submitting itself to a greater behemoth.)
Youngsters disrupt the status quo set by their elders. (It is their sociological role to do so.) They are catalysers of change. They challenge for the sake of challenging. They test which social structures deserve to survive by shaking them to their cores.
And make no mistake, Facebook will crumble too.
Mark is not connecting the world. It is the opposite. Mark is disconnecting the world by virtualising the already-existing real friendships.
The very word "friend" has lost its meaning. We have become estranged from each other, turning into wanna-be celebrities broadcasting to our own friends and anxiously building fake images. We are now meeting up less often in the real world because we are meeting up more often in the virtual world.
Mark is riding a massive cultural wave and creating a positive feedback loop that is accelerating the death of this very wave. The hegemony of self-exhibitionist narcissistic openness will soon come to a halt. (Early adopters have already fled this trend.) The pendulum has shifted too much in the direction of openness and atomistic individualism. Now, along with the massive conservativeness wave in politics, it will shift back to reservedness and community-oriented holism.
True. The most tangible network is our friendship network. But that should not make you think that Facebook is built on better foundations than something like Twitter which is built on interest-based networks. In fact, the opposite is true: It is platforms like Twitter which serve a real need rather than Facebook.
Interest-based communities existed before Facebook and will continue to exist after Facebook. The true strength of the internet has lied in its ability bring out the long tail in everything. Thanks to the internet, a substantial number of people can gather around a very niche topic and buy stuff related to a very niche interest, stuff which would have never made it to the physical shelves due to the diffuse geographic distribution of the demand.
Soon people will realise that the only real value offered by Facebook lies in its ability to connect us to our long-lost friends, and Facebook will be used primarily as a catalogue of expired friendships and our long-lost friends will upgrade from a mass grave to a proper cemetery.
So Mark, why so serious?
