Here at Social Media Today, we get a lot of inquiries from students--middle schoolers through post-graduate--who are doing research about social media. I suspect this has as much to do with our prominence on every student's step-one research tool (starts with "G" and ends with "oogle") as with superior expertise. And often we leverage the fact that the target of these requests is an unnamed Sir or Ma'am to let them go unanswered.
But yesterday I fielded a few questions from a young lady in high school. And I found the experience of answering at her prompts rather than trying to concoct something clever from scratch refreshing.
Good researcher that she is, she brought up a post I wrote several years ago, called "The Facebook Death Watch Begins," To this day it is one of the all-time most read posts on this site and it still dominates search results for my name.
Usually when people bring up that post, it is with about $16 billion worth of sarcasm in their voice. But I am just stupid enough to defend my prediction still.
So even though my interviewer's Facebook question and my response is only a piece of our exchange, I reprint the whole below.
In your opinion, has social media helped or hindered personal relationships among America's younger generations, and how so?
I don't think we'll really know whether social media will help or hinder young people's ability to develop relationships for some time. Because I don't think one way of having a relationship--spending time directly with someone, for instance--is necessarily BETTER than another, like conducting many relationships in the shortest of short formats, with just seconds allocated to each interaction. For a totally wired world, those social media skills may prove more useful--certainly professionally, and perhaps for the attainment of personal goals as well.
But, perhaps because I'm old (47!), and can remember a time when technology was a telephone, I do think that what young people who succumb entirely to the compulsive allure of social devices probably don't appreciate is that we are evolved to find reward in direct interaction with each other. These needs are physical and chemical (and sexuality is only a small part of what I'm talking about) and while we may mentally adapt for remote and abstracted relationships in just a few years, we remain cavepeople in most of the ways that matter. Being less skilled at direct interactiion will hinder our own fulfillment, and is likely have unexpected side effects as well.
Do you expect social media to have the same, less, or greater impact on future generations?
I have no idea. I don't think we can accurately extrapolate from what's happening now for further than five or 10 years. And anyone who says they can is a fool or liar.
And referring to your article about the decline of Facebook, do you believe sometime in the near future another social media website will takeover or has the Facebook phenomenon created too big of a dent in society to be replaced?
How good of you to do some basic research on me. I've taken some ribbing for that Facebook article. But I don't regret it. If you're not ready to be declarative, you might as well not bother to write.
And actually, I am still pretty damn sure that Facebook won't be around for the long haul (say 10 years again). Because you know what? No Internet entity has ever managed to maintain dominance that long.
Here are the reasons that Facebook's rate of growth relative to other social tools is already slowing and that its dominant position will erode.
- Because regardless of what a bunch of KoolAid-drinking advertising execs believe, the goals of providing an environment for social interaction on one hand and selling people things on the other are implicitly in tension. Facebook's revenue extraction tactics have already gone from imperceptible to a detectable squeeze as far as its users are concerned. And now that they are a public company, the pressure to deliver revenue is going to be unrelenting. They will cannabalize what they've built until it's a shadow of its former self. And that's probably the right strategy. They'll be enough to eat there for years to come.
- Because scale DOES reduce agility, and Facebook as an enterprise will calcify pretty promptly now. They all do.
- Because there is something tribal about the way we seek associations. There must always be "us" and "the other." And the separation of being friends on Facebook with one person but not with another is not sufficient gulf to fill that need. You don't want to share the same domain, the same color scheme, the same page layout, or the same feature set with those not of your tribe, even if it means settling for a social network with less features. I have often thought that if Facebook really wanted to attempt long-term dominance, they would take their billions and create dozens of social networks built by separate teams, cloak the fact that they all share the same parent in layers of holding companies, and make an infinite business model out of shaving fractions of value out of the data on user behavior and buying habits.
- And not least because, if you are like most of the young people I've been hearing from, you are already moving away from Facebook. Because that's where your parents are.