Why Facebook Is Dead And Buried
THIS is a fairly strong prediction: that Facebook is actually dead and buried. At the same time as it manages to increase the number of users, increase the amount of time they spend on the site and also charge more money for each of the more ads they see. Sounds difficult that it could be dead as a result of all of that.
But the argument is actually a little different:
What appears to be the most seminal moment in a young person’s decision to leave Facebook was surely that dreaded day your mum sends you a friend request. You just can’t be young and free if you know your parents can access your every indiscretion. The desire for the new, also drives each new generation to find their own media and this is playing out now in social media. It is nothing new that young people care about style and status in relation to their peers, and Facebook is simply not cool anymore.
It’s not that Facebook isn’t a good site: the alternatives that people are using are much more limited in their functionality than Facebook is. It’s not that people don’t want to use social media: not at all, they’re using other services to do very much the same things.
It is, rather, that well known anthropological syndrome whereby today’s teenage generation defines itself as simply being different from whatever the generation before were doing. It doesn’t particularly matter either. If my, now increasingly aged, segment of the population had all been listening to rap music in our teens then this generation would be swooning over the white boy blues. If the generation above me had been wearing zoot suits instead of being mods and rockers then it would have been my generation that became the mods and rockers. Or, in fact, anything other than zoot suits.
It’s just what every generation does: revolts against the accepted mores of the one before. The sex and the drugs are always pretty much the same but the music, the places to hang out, the clothes, they’re going to be different just to make the point that this is indeed a new and different generation.
And Facebook is now part of the establishment and thus it is going to be dropped by the coming generation.
Posted: 29th, December 2013 | In: Money, Technology Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
