Predicting the end of Facebook in 2014 is a bit like predicting the fall of the Wall in the 1980s, writes Ruby Murray in the Guardian yesterday. But two days ago, something exciting happened. San Francisco began to abandon the now ad-ridden platform in favor of the clean, empty social networking site Ello.
On Thursday, the new anti-Facebook team was struggling to cope with tens of thousands of requests to join from users.
Ello bills itself as a socially conscious network and has its own manifesto. Its logo is somewhat menacing: a black smiley face, grinning ironically. The brainchild of Kidrobot designer Paul Budnitz, Ello began to develop after Facebook's obsession with pseudonyms, its "real names" policy, which the gay community tried to overturn.
This year marks ten years since Mark Zuckerberg and his 20-year-old programmers moved to Palo Alto, California, and ushered in a new phase in the Internet's infant history. "Facebook has succeeded in providing us with a mirror during our early development.
It is inevitable, then, that its downfall will be born of a problem that only begins to affect you as you grow older: the complex nature of time,” writes young Ruby Murray. Our old selves Facebook’s core function is the management of photo albums and ourselves in general.
Like other narcissists, we organize thousands of photos of ourselves over the years. But there is no similar function for the identities we create as we grow older: our thoughts, our books, our articles, and the music we listen to. Given that Facebook claims that American users spend about 40 minutes a day on the site, or 243 hours a year, it’s clear that our old selves are starting to feel oppressive.
Facebook's most important social function was that, unlike photography, it gave us a platform for communication. But then it started using algorithms and filters to choose which posts you saw in your News Feed, making you more likely to follow Britney Spears' updates than your friends'. The result was a fixation on childhood.
And when Facebook acts like an oppressive parent, it's natural for adults to want to run away.
Source: tro-ma-ktiko.blogspot.gr
