Disclaimer: I like twitter over facebook, which I don't use that much, and my comment history will show that I'm a twitter 'lackey', so to speak.
Does anyone else feel that the facebook moment is fading away? People have compared information to food, and I can see the similarities. When you come from a place where there's little or no food, you want to hoard all you can -- why yes, I would love to see your babies pics every day, of course, post three dozen photos of the same party from different angles, I love it, why yes, this memory from seven years ago is exactly what I need. When you're saturated with information (in this case, social media information), it doesn't feel as special anymore. Soon, you realize that while looking at Christmas photos from people you went to high school with, was fun for a while, there is only so much space in your head and social energy. The marginal value of that extra bit goes down, and averages start leveling off or going down. There's too much food everywhere, you don't want to be forced with another plate of who-gives-an-eff-about-your-fifth-Halloween-in-a-row. What was originally curiosity and genuine excitement about other people's lives becomes social courtesy: of course you will like your almost-friend's child's photos because that's what good friends would do. Social networking (in facebook form) becomes ritualistic.
So the solution is social networks that (artificially) limit your access to information, such as snapchat and twitter. You want to only share a few things, with a few people at a time, and perhaps that shared thing will disappear in a couple of days/hours/views. To me that sounds like the long-term future of social media.
There's a pretty big difference between communicating in and about the present vs. communicating about the past. I think what you've identified is the beginning of a distinction between those two activities in the technologies we use.
My grandparents have a large collection of photos, each captioned with the year, location, and the reason the photo was taken. Looking through these photos is a great experience because it's a curated history of their lives. For better or worse, the practice maintaining photo collections in that manner has been made obsolete by technology. The equivalent now is to upload everything and have technology curate it for you, filtering out the mundane and saving the important or otherwise memorable content. That's what the Facebook timeline attempts to do, and it's a feature missing from the other social applications you identified.
I don't think it's a failure of Twitter or Snapchat that they lack curated timelines, though. That's not their purpose. They are aimed squarely at communicating at and about the present. If they do take over in-the-present communication from Facebook, though, then Facebook will have a hard time constructed the curated timeline.
>There's a pretty big difference between communicating in and about the present vs. communicating about the past. I think what you've identified is the beginning of a distinction between those two activities in the technologies we use.
That's a great observation. I had not explored that line of reasoning. That gives me something to chew on. Right off though, I'd say that... I suspect we used to value communicating about the past more because it was so difficult to do so, but as facebook makes it easier, the value has gone down.
How's this sound: before long epics were written down, the oral tradition of reciting them kept them alive, and thus the entire process was valued. Once they were written, it got easier to 'remember' the epics. S, writing was not as valuable as orally remembering/reciting because it was easier/more common/not as important? This is not the best comparison, but sounds right to me at the moment.
I think you're partly right, but I think another aspect of it is how new all this technology is. We completely dropped the "old" way of doing things (carefully take photo, get it developed, store it in an album) and replaced it with the current way (take lots of photos, upload them all to some service, share with friends) in a decade or less. Most people simply haven't accumulated all that much history on these services yet. It'll be interesting to see what our personal histories look like once this technology has been around for a few more decades. Things like the Facebook timeline may become increasingly important, or we may all abandon curated histories because (as you say) information is so easily retrieved now.
The internet I like isn't the internet that the greater population likes. I liked when Twitter was just text. I like Twitter because when I follow an entity, I see everything they publish - and if I don't like what they're publishing, I unfollow them, or block them. It's easier to get to the source of information via Twitter. For a while, with third party software, I was able to even more selectively block what was coming down my feed - I think MetroTweet at one point might have allowed regular expression filters. I stick to the web interface & the iOS app, but I would probably pay money again for a third party Twitter app that allows regex filters.
Other people think 140 characters isn't enough for their audience, and write 20 tweets in a row, or post an image with a bunch of text in it.
I keep Facebook fairly reasonable by blocking and unfollowing, but there's so much of the presentation that's just out of my control. I appreciate how I can keep in touch with people I don't get to hang out with often, but I feel like I'm swimming in the deep end of the marketing pool just to wave hi every now and then. With a text feed, I can dream of something like a regex filter - and probably write something to make that happen. With Facebook, there's no way I'll ever be able to tell it "Hide all posts that contain images with caps-lock, block lettering"
Anyhow, that's all to say that I like Twitter more than Facebook, and I'm enjoying whatever it is while it lasts.
I've claimed a similar phenomenom before. Going back further, when there was much less content, even chain letters seemed awesome and hilarious (and worth keeping around). Now, in a post-buzzfeed world, I don't want any more junk food.
Hilariously, you can see older people (like your parents, if they aren't already savvy,) start to use the internet more, and enter the chain letter phase....then send them to you because omg they're amazing. Meanwhile, your hipster internet-consumer self tries to politely decline the second helping of cheap candy.
Filtration is the key - I mainly want healthy information, with the occasional disgusting treat :-)
In reality, most people will seek out disgusting treats all day, then have a bit of healthy stuff out of guilt. That's happening already. The money is in the sugar. When it comes to supernormal stimuli, pleasure usually takes over -- not rationality.
"...Let’s start with what most people probably can agree. Information is accumulating online. The amount of available information is increasing at an exponential rate, some say it doubles every second year. This mean that any illusion of being able to stay up to date with everything that is going on is utopian and has been probably since Guttenberg invented the press.
Most people know this, yet that is exactly exactly what we all seem to be doing.
There is no shortage of content aggregators and aggregators of aggregators, daily developed to give us a better overview of all the sources of information we have subscribed to and found ourselves now depending on.
This has resulted in an endless stream of articles, news, pictures, websites, products, updates, comments of updates and comments to these comments, being delivered to us second by second that each of us have to deal with.
Constantly checking our feeds for new information, we seem to be hoping to discover something of interest, something that we can share with our networks, something that we can use, something that we can talk about, something that we can act on, something we didn’t know we didn’t know.
It almost seems like an obsession and many critics of digital technology would argue that by consuming information this way we are running the danger of destroying social interaction between humans. One might even say that we have become slaves of the feed.
It might be an obsession, but I think it’s an obsession that many critics will find themselves having to submit to sooner or later...."
Totally agree on Facebook, but Twitter is much more valuable than the ephemeral tweets.
I think the difference between the two comes from the nature of user relationships. While on Facebook it had to be reciprocal (following was added later and it's not used much), on Twitter the user relationships can be one way. That makes all the difference. This is why on Facebook the user relationships are just replicas of real-life relationships, which was great for user acquisition but it's also a huge limitation that Facebook can't get past. On Twitter on the other hand anyone can follow anyone and while user acquisition is more difficult, it opens up the world and gives a lot of opportunity for new user relationships. Because of this Twitter is the best social network we have so far.
> So the solution is social networks that (artificially) limit your access to information, such as snapchat and twitter. You want to only share a few things, with a few people at a time, and perhaps that shared thing will disappear in a couple of days/hours/views. To me that sounds like the long-term future of social media.
not a heavy user of social network sites, so this probably won't be everyone's experience, but the features you mentioned(limit of access to information, sharing only a few things, etc) can be done on any platform. It's really how you use it; none of the sites force you to share every moment with the world
imo the long-term future of social media is to get you to use it as much as you can so they can sell ads to you
Does anyone else feel that the facebook moment is fading away? People have compared information to food, and I can see the similarities. When you come from a place where there's little or no food, you want to hoard all you can -- why yes, I would love to see your babies pics every day, of course, post three dozen photos of the same party from different angles, I love it, why yes, this memory from seven years ago is exactly what I need. When you're saturated with information (in this case, social media information), it doesn't feel as special anymore. Soon, you realize that while looking at Christmas photos from people you went to high school with, was fun for a while, there is only so much space in your head and social energy. The marginal value of that extra bit goes down, and averages start leveling off or going down. There's too much food everywhere, you don't want to be forced with another plate of who-gives-an-eff-about-your-fifth-Halloween-in-a-row. What was originally curiosity and genuine excitement about other people's lives becomes social courtesy: of course you will like your almost-friend's child's photos because that's what good friends would do. Social networking (in facebook form) becomes ritualistic.
So the solution is social networks that (artificially) limit your access to information, such as snapchat and twitter. You want to only share a few things, with a few people at a time, and perhaps that shared thing will disappear in a couple of days/hours/views. To me that sounds like the long-term future of social media.
Anyone have any thoughts?