Facebook Thoughts 2

The question: is facebook a fad or a permanent fixture of the internet? To me, social networking is not a fad. As its natural conclusion, it will displace google, and mobile-network services (eg. sms, calls).

Fad:

1) The social-communication functions which facebook optimizes can be performed more effectively with mobile connections. Also, it does not introduce fundamental changes in the demands of the way we communicate over the web.

- Facebook is essentially a form of entertainment, whose medium are memes, photos, quotes, and 9gag links. These are fads. Counter: Facebook shares these. It can conceivably integrate new fads.

Permanent fixture:

1) Facebook connectivity is structural. Social information-sharing will become the main engine of information-distribution on the internet. The evolution of this information sharing will depend largely on the share options provided by Facebook.

2) The internet is an information bank. Information-acquisition is either personal or social. Personal information acquisition is conditioned by individual conditions. You need to research something - go to google. You want entertainment - go to youtube, and so on. Facebook is different. You do not know what you want when you go to Facebook. So unlike google or youtube, there is no initial goal. Why? Because the information I get on facebook is socially conditioned, a forum of friends. I am part of that social condition. Joining that social condition is called facebooking.

(Anything phenomenologically 'Real' is social, or personified. Facebook personifies the Internet as lifestyle space, makes it Real in that sense. The benefit is that this personification is precisely a corresponding mimicry of the real-world social.)

So we are in conversation in an imaginary space of friends. What kinds of ideals do Facebook represent, socially? Who is facebook? A memorable conversation with your best friend? The best night out? The desire to idealize social space.

3) The oligopolisation of information over the internet. The decreasing role of Google search and small sites. Personal expression converging in public mediums and forms. The culturalization of the web accelerates with the concentration of expression in a series of facebookable forms, providing fresh principles for creativity. Very quick cycles of forms, requiring new updates and options.

Fad? No. At worst a slow decline.