everybody is looking for fame; to have their fifteen minutes of notoriety, maybe on facebook
Roberto Benigni, Italian director
Facebook is a phenomena of strong impact. Up until today there are 850 millions members and its band-with is increasing with 10 million of users per month.
As I earlier stated I have started annabook as a healthy alternative to Facebook. Though I admit the many positive sides a global platform such as facebook have, I feel the negative aspects are far more damaging to the individual as well as to the world as a whole. I have seen many dangerous signs from the continuing development of Facebook, but no real resistance to this movement to be found. I am not trying to convince anyone to stop using Facebook. I just think that many individuals are not really reflecting upon how they use Internet, and the long-term effects their habits might have. I believe more people need to be aware of the cyber-world they are merged in before they click "agree".
Let me start with some positive aspects regarding Facebook. We have all seen how much power such a platform had during the spring revolutions in the arabic world. It might not have been facebook and other social networks that started the revolution, but it can be stated that these worked as a way to connect thousands and thousands of individuals to stand up against their leaders. Such a massive demonstration, especially in strongly controlled dictatorships, could otherwise have been hard to realize.
Many also like to show on the way these social networks can be a way to democratize the world. Through sharing, and especially when sharing without paying for it, we can get together and change things. If we are enough people, we can make things come true.
An example of how lots of people together changed the world was "the invisible children". An American was filming in Uganda when he discovered how the rebels kidnapped thousands and thousands of children and turned them into child warriors. Since the US government would not do anything to stop it, he started an organization, which grew and grew and today has thousands of members. The organization even managed, through pressure, have Obama send a small troupe of soldiers to protect the children in Uganda. And all this was made thanks to a huge amount of people getting together, through various platforms or social networks.
A third positive example of how facebook can be a good thing is for connecting with people which might otherwise not be having contact with anyone. Lonely people or elderly which do not have a lot of social contact, can find such on websides such as facebook. But here again, I am sceptical because of the real quality of such connection. Is not the lonely person looking for friends on Facebook, not only making illusionary friends? is not a real friend someone you should meet and have a direct relation with? Facebook might be a great way for some people to exhibit what they do in their lives, and just as Benigni says, it might feel like they are standing in the spotlight. But are they really being paid attention to, or is it just an imagination developed in a virtual world?
I will willingly agree, that if a platform is used in these ways they are positive. But as it turns out these are only the good sides of it. The darker sides are often sides many people do not know about, or are too lazy to really care about. Or they know about the negative sides but continue using the platform anyway for its good sides. Any way, it is important that each and every one of us open our eyes for what social networks are doing to us. And here is some of it.
During the year 2012, the fight between the giant four of Internet has intensified, according to Swedish Newspaper DN. Each and every one of these would like to rule the world: the e-commerce giant Amazon, the social network Facebook, the search engine Google and Apple. So why is it not until now that these globalized companies have culminated? Because before they were doing business in different branches. The key to expansion today for these companies is to find ways to connect our social lives with our consumption, and try doing this with their own hardware. Their strategy is to merge culture, media, newspaper, music and products so that all comes in on the same arena.
When it comes to Tv entertainment Google/Youtube and Amazon not only act as distributors, but also as producers, with their own channels and program development. The key word is to control the whole experience. For both national TV-companies as well as Internet companies, the digitalization brings possibilities of mapping viewers preferences. In other words, the television is watching us, just much as we are watching it.
During these last months, a couple of news have proven that the four Internet giants are moving their positions forward against each other - and the users! During the launching of its new policy, Google stated its right to store our personal web history for eternity - in order to produce personalized advertising!
During the mapping of our lives, the Internet companies do need our formal agreement. What they do therefore is to make sure that we, the users, register. The giants' collection of data is so enormous. Such an amount of data has never previously been seen during history. The global giants have found a the world's largest and best sellers - our friends!
Social commerce, the so called s-commerce, will lift our willingness to consume to new levels. Generally people have developed a scepsis against sellers, advertising and other one-direction publicity. Of our friends, on the other hand, we still have faith. Therefore our shopping habits will be merged with our social interaction. Next month Facebook will be introduced to the stock market with an extremely high evaluation. The reason is that Facebook is the world's biggest and most natural junction
- family wise, locally, and globally - with an outspoken intention of a meeting spot for consumption.
The strategy of the giant four is no longer to build its business around one unique branch. You do not earn money on selling some few products, but rather on the knowledge of when, what and how you manage to sell to people. These companies want to know, and build their business-models according to, people's psychology and behavior.
The stories we buy are being adapted to a market need - but the opposite way will also be used: marketing will be adapted to the stories we are ready to hear. A Swedish marketing-strategist working for facebook Ninni Lindertz said that instead of one-way messages to consumers, facebook's advertising will be composed of an interactive "storytelling", where the offers have a direct correlation to our lives. If you are planning to have an Italian dinner, an ad for an Italian wine, that a friend have recommended earlier, might pop up.
The giant are developing more and more ways to get into people's brains, passing by their social relations. What are people thinking of? What do they want to pay for? What do people want in one hour?
In this movement, Amazon, Apple, Googl and Facebook, will dominate in the next coming years. Other such "social" companies are for example Tumblr, Pinterest and Twitter. These are companies which, just like the giant four, are based on human knowledge and social behavior, rather than technical competence.
This struggle has led to a repeated intrusions in our private spheres and trading of people's choices in a legal grey zone. A couple of weeks ago, it was discovered that Twitter , through the company Datasift, had offered all the twitter history (including information of the user's location) during the last two month to external companies. It was recently detected that Google and Apple use cookies and apps to spy on its users. In one case with iPhone, Apple had distributed the access to users private address-books and photos.
Even if the mapping of our behavior has come a long way, the control of our thoughts are only just in the beginning. New methods for measuring are always developing. Apple has taken patent of an interface for reading of our eye movement. The company Senseye proclaims it next year will have a program ready for telephones that can register how we react on different pages and read.
The US has also developed a software that is capable of screening eye movements and the change of size of the pupil. This way the program can detect and avoid criminal actions before they are committed.
What is stunning to me is not the huge amount of treading by these four giant. What is surprising to me is that no one appears to be protesting against this. Neither are parties or organization working for integrity moving a finger.
No matter which will be the players on the market in ten years, the monitoring of the worlds population is built on participation, on a freewill basis. The giant four therefore need to take care about their reputation as a nice friendly company with compelling visions. This is getting harder as controlling ambitions increase. What will be decisive for success will be the fact that in the end these companies deliver convenience. Life becomes more comfortable with the integration of our needs.
Today we can only guess what the commercializing and mapping do to our social relations and how it affects our relationship to the net giants. However, not much fantasy or cynism are needed to see the risk for a decisive next step will be that the market players and the states - of course with a nobel motive - unite their data. This way they can study our behavior, read our thoughts, deliver us products, drain our purse and intervene before we commit false actions.
All we need to do is that one and only click "I agree".
