‘WE’blog

So I was thinking about writing about my new doomsday theory of social media as we know it, when I checked in on facebook and found a link to an article.
(Thanks to barbara for sharing!)

I will share my theory first, then comment on the article and after that lean back and hope to get some response other than “Perhaps you should go to bed”.

I believe, we will see a decline in social media within the next couple of years, starting in the low power distance countries first. I have absolutely no reliable source to back it up, but if you find some, please share!

Part of it comes from my personal view, you know… “If I’m getting fed up with it, surely others must feel the same way”, but it is also about pattern recognition. Facebook has become perfect. They finally solved the problems with quizzes and horrible farmwill requests, or maybe I’ve just been online for so long that I’ve somehow managed to block them all. Anyway, it works, that’s the point.

So, now that FB has done more or less all they can do to make it as smooth for the users as possible, they’ve started to focus more on going out to the rest of the world. I can be on facebook from anywhere anytime, and I can spread my profound wisdom and preferences about anything from anywhere and post it on my wall without visiting. It is PERFECT!

But what happens, when something is perfect, is that people become existentialists. Suddenly we have the mental surplus to say: “This is as good as it gets, but is that good enough for me?”
Is facebook fulfilling compared to the amount of attention I give it?

When the future of social media is discussed, the basic thesis (as I perceive it) is usually based on: “How can we engage the users even more?”
But is that really what the users want? Right now, yeah, maybe, but what if we have already reached a climax of engagement?

What if the future of social media is actually about spending as little time as possible on a web based device – and as much time as possible IRL?

I was offline for 3 amazing days and came back to 300+ recent activities on facebook (just klick the button, come on, you know you want to…). That is fairly overwhelming, considering that I like to keep myself updated. This happens, because facebook assumes that I want to spend my whole day on it.

But if I actually only want to spend one day a week on it, the whole structure of FB becomes unappealing to me. I don’t like to feel that I am loosing track of things, even if it is things I don’t know if I wanted to keep track of.

The article I’ve linked to is about how the new technology distracts us in our daily work. However, the really interesting part of it is it says, that it has always been that way. Before computers there was watches and newspapers. The article quotes some of our great philosophers in says it is a human thing. We feel the need to be distracted out of fear of being confronted with real life pain, boredom, anxiety.

So, what will be the next big thing after Facebook?