What Lessons Are To Be Learned As Facebook Seeks To Supersede The Internet Itself?

by TeachThought Staff

Social media has done a lot of things, from connecting long lost friends (whether or not they wanted to be connected), to somehow convincing your mother to share memes and gif animations as ironic responses in a threaded facebook ‘conversation.’

It also makes it simple to find information, collaborate on projects, and store content in a virtual private library you curate on your own. But one silent effect of social media is the way it has tamed the internet.

The internet used to be a series of connected content—thus the inter part—that allowed the publishing of informative or commercial interests. Provided you knew the URL, much like an alphanumeric phone number.

That’s where Google came in. While there is some confusion[i] as to the exact birthdate, Google emerged in the late 1990s as a way for people to find information. This idea of a search engine hit mainstream, and the internet essentially became useless without Google. That’s not to say that it would not have survived without it; in the vacuum of a missing Google, something else would’ve emerged to guide our way around.

As it is, the internet has a kind of ecology to it, and so when one thing exists, everything else is affected.

The Social Internet Is A New Internet

Facebook officially began February 4, 2004[ii] as “thefacebook,” and in August 2005 the domain “facebook.com” was purchased for a paltry sum of $200,000[iii]. Within a year, Facebook and MySpace were being used by up to 90% of college students[iv], and as of 2017, nearly 25% of the world’s population uses it regularly.

So of course, Google would eventually respond with the underwhelming Google+, which never took off but can provide some lessons. A lot can be inferred from Google’s hurried assembly of Google+, the Mountain View, California company’s late entry into the social media game, primarily the absolute necessity of complete social media integration. This is not a trend nor even a new dynamic, but rather a new kind of media that isn’t merely ‘social,’ but social first.

Non-social digital media are left to breathe on their own without the native, living, breathing context social components supply, something Google perhaps valued too late. Google has realized that age of search-results-as-commodity is threatened when information access is crowd-sourced, an idea acknowledged with the dynamic auto-complete added to search results in 2008 [vi]. The revised autocomplete feature ‘suggests’ searches based on what others have searched for in the past using Google’s advanced algorithm.

Though not directly social, it added a wrinkle to searching that gave it new life. But times they are a’changin’. In mid-2009, the average time per visitor in the U.S. on Facebook.com surpassed that spent on ‘Google sites’ (i.e., sites found via Google).

As of June 2017, facebook ‘enjoys’ over 2 billion monthly active users, with nearly 80% of all Americans using it, and nearly 400 new users signing up every minute of every day. [vii] We very well may be headed towards the erosion of the internet, and the beginning of the socialnet, fully warped by the intense gravity of social media sites like facebook.

Billions. Of. Active. Users. For. A. Single. Website.

Everything you read—social or not—is them framed mentally through potentially social terms.

Forced Transparency Forces Change In Usage & Accountability

If the University Of Alabama ‘racist sorority girl’ video taught us anything, it’s that—well, wait. We knew social media was social. That’s kind of the point.

With the extraordinary emergence of social media platforms, internet use is now fully transparent for a very active percentage of the internet. Issues of identity theft, seedy content, and permanently damaged reputations have many cautious users continue to prefer anonymity while connected, never shopping online, using alias usernames, and completely separating their life online and off.

Still, other users have fully embraced this concept of transparency, carefully cultivating an online image that itself is connected to global networks of like-minded folks whose common ground is entirely digital. Through social media, digital portfolios communicate for these users as actively as words and sentences, allowing for a very visible demonstration of skills and expertise that a resume or even in-person interview could never provide.

And with the emergence of competition-friendly APIs, social media players have smartly avoided competition, allowing your Linkedin, twitter, Facebook all ‘talk’ to one another. Twitter updates can be automatically absorbed by Linkedin, and Blog content can be posted right to your Facebook wall. In this way, each can fill a niche without being hunted by ‘competition.’

There is also the practice of sharing, ‘liking,’ and ‘+1s.’ In the social media world, your interests are on display for everyone, whether by choice (joining a Linkedin or Facebook group), or indirectly (Google finds everything). In this context, users begin to–often via game mechanics–seek out transparency, a boom for Facebook, and a boon for the corporate world.

Further, there are ironic accounts, ways to be passive-aggressive, ‘back rooms’ and private messaging forums that themselves have ‘groups,’ and more. It’s a lot to keep up with, nevermind the dynamic of hostile political debates and social justice warrior’ing. Through this kind of mutual interest and quasi-integration, transparency—to whatever degree it is achievable—was inevitable.

Social changes social.

Perhaps the most spectacular way social media tamed the internet was by appealing to the mainstream rather than tech users in the same way that Tesla has sought to make the electric car mainstream-ise as well.

And not the trendy, upstart, San Francisco’mainstream,’ but a truly large swath of the population. If grandmothers want to see pictures of their grandkids, they’d have to use Facebook. The quickest way to speak to your mother is no longer be a phone call—which ties you both up for 20 minutes—but rather a text message, or a text message on facebook that facebook calls a ‘facebook message.’

The transparency of communication disrobed public discourse in great part, moving away from the isolation of email, or the way the ideas of a phone call dissovled the moment you hung up. Social media curates both communication and relationship patterns, something too tempting for families to turn away from.

Collaborative gaming—not through Steam, Playstation, or Xbox but through the same platform you just ‘liked’ an image and responded to a video through—also gave a playful tone to social media that not only demystified gaming, but defused the sense among an older generation that these platforms were a ‘waste of time,’ and an ‘invasion of privacy,’ akin to inviting a child into a van with a lollipop.

Conclusion

Certainly the internet continues to have an underbelly. It is itself a reflection of culture, and the more ‘able’ and diverse it becomes, the more accurately it will simultaneously shape and reflect societal trends and value—for better or for worse.

Regardless, through connecting content, creating transparency, and appealing to a broad set of users, the internet—to whatever degree is possible—has been forever altered by the addition of lively human interaction, and carefully constructed (artificial?) digital avatars that streamline access to notifications and their subsequent dopamine releases. 

Image attribution flickr users lukehayfieldphotography, seeminglee, and sfllaw