“Facebookistan” is now the third largest country on the planet. Imagine a place nearly as large as China or India, populated entirely by voyeurs and narcissists (read with humor). The number of people on the planet who use Facebook has reached 550 million in only six years. Almost twice as many people as live in the U.S. And they are connecting in a new and very open way.
As social media platforms emerged these past few years, psychologists and social scientists debated whether people would develop anti-social tendencies due to decreased human interaction. The remarkable reality is that people are communicating MORE, not LESS; and they are doing it differently than in the past.
Gen Z does not use email and, in fact, some futurists predict that email will not be used at all when these young people reach the workplace. Frankly, this demographic doesn’t use the phone much either. Although it may seem to older groups that this type of communication would be less intimate, the inverse is actually true. Short bursts of deeply personal thoughts shoot across cyber-space to a broad network of “friends” through Facebook posts, Tweets and blogs. No wonder TIME Magazine named Mark Zuckerberg the Person of the Year. Not since the invention of the telephone has the way we connect with each other been more radically altered.
David Brooks wrote an interesting column in the New York Times in October, called The Flock Comedies, about the genre of television shows emerging over the past decade of “diverse friendship tribes.” The idea that people have traded intense one-on-one relationships for “packs” of friends seems born out in social networking, as well as on television. The connective tissue that binds us together has become more diffuse.
An interesting by-product of the Facebook revolution is the intersection of narcissism and voyeurism. Now that every ten year old has a cell phone equipped with a camera, a new wave of self-promotion has emerged with entire galleries of self-portraits happily posted by their owners. The voyeuristic contribution comes from their network of friends who cheerily comment on how beautiful they are. There is, of course, a dark side to this, but hey, we’re boosting each other’s self esteem, right? A positive view is that “photography” has become a creative art form for an entire generation of teens.
What makes a business successful? Look at any example and you will find the same theme repeatedly – give people what they want. TIME had a fantastic observation about the success of Facebook in their “Person of the Year” issue. It is that, “People don’t want to escape their lives. They want to be more deeply embedded in them.” With a vast network of friends embedded with us, it isn’t a lonely place at all.
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