As my generation starts to jump on the Twitter bandwagon, about 40% of my friends now have an active account. The ones who Twitter are just as quick to defend their new addictions as the non-Twitterers are to put it down- it seems to be a topic that no one remains dispassionate about. Yesterday, I walked to the farmers market with a non-Twitterer who brought up the outages on Twitter and Facebook that occurred a few days ago. She didn’t understand how so many people could be upset about it, “What did these people do last year? Twitter isn’t that old!”
I thought about that for a second- these technologies are so new but have such fast adoption that it’s hard to imagine what we did without them. What did people do before Facebook and Twitter allowed them to keep track of their friends? And what’s next? Or is Facebook the end of the line? There’s been a lot of speculation on whether or not Facebook will be able to retain its dominance in the social media arena. After all, the networks like mySpace and Friendster that preceded Facebook are now ghost towns of abandoned profiles and spammers.
According to Newsweek, Facebook needs to maintain their edge by preventing “context collapse,” which I can best illustrate through a conversation I sat in on a few months ago. I was visiting a friend and we drove to see her mother who had just signed up for Facebook. She mentioned looking at my friend’s profile and seeing typical college photos. “Is this what I paid for?” she asked half-jokingly. I imagine this conversation has happened many times over to other parents and children. Luckily my father is still figuring out cell phones, so I haven’t had to have this talk yet.
What’s happening here is that the “cool” factor of anything is severely diminished as it becomes less exclusive. Once your grandmother is on Facebook, any illusion of “cool” is quickly destroyed. As more and more people join, the more guarded people will be over the information they share, and will perhaps decide that this isn’t an anxiety worth dealing with and leave the network. But Facebook thinks that the more people who are on the site, the more valuable it will be. I can see that as well- I know many people who have friendly relationships with family on Facebook and it’s a great way to show them what you’re doing in between phone calls. The next few years are critical in determining which of these paths the general public will choose.
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