by Kerry Lengel - Oct. 2, 2010 07:21 PM
The Arizona Republic
Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/thingstodo/stage/articles/2010/10/02/20101002facebook-social-media-power-500-million-friends-web-network.html#ixzz11J1S9791
Just how big is Facebook?
The social-networking powerhouse has more active users - those famous "500 million friends" - than the U.S. has residents. The site is No. 2 in global Web traffic behind Google, the world's homepage.
In fact, among such popular social-media sites as MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn, Facebook is so dominant that it has been compared to a monopolistic utility - something that people treat as a necessity rather than a luxury. And it's not yet 7 years old.
That doesn't mean it might not turn out to be a flash in the pan, like America Online or other short-lived conquerors of cyberspace.
But even if Facebook fades, the social-media revolution is here to stay. It already has changed the way we work and play, and it's erasing the boundaries between those zones of life, giving millions of people the opportunity to project a virtual image of themselves into cyberspace - to find friendship, love, business opportunities or various forms of digital mischief.
"People who are on Facebook occasionally go on and post status updates, like 'I am having a bad day' or 'I like this music group,' " says Ananda Mitra, communication professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. "They might not be conscious of it, but at that very moment, they have described themselves, and anyone who stumbles on that page would immediately create (a mental picture of) them."
In ancient times, only the rich and powerful - poets, priests, philosophers, emperors memorialized in marble - indulged in the luxury of splitting their personalities in two: the private person and the public persona, crafted to have a certain effect. With the advent of social media, however, anybody with Internet access has the opportunity to shape a public persona - or many of them. You can be a comedian on Facebook, an investment expert on LinkedIn and a rock critic on Twitter, all at the same time.
FAMOUS IN JAPAN?
Like so many others, Ron May, Valley theater director and actor and a confessed Facebook addict, was hesitant when his real-life friends first dragged him to the site a few years ago, during the great migration from MySpace and other early-adopter social media.
"Everybody was shifting over to Facebook, and I was violently opposed to it," he says. "People were giving me virtual beers and 'poking' me. I didn't get it. I got sick of 'I have a headache' or 'I just had lunch.' "
But one thing that attracted him was how easy it is to track down old friends or long-lost relatives. And as he added more and more "friends" - and as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg tweaked the interface and "news feed" algorithms - May let his theatrical instincts take over.
His posts are like a series of catty one-liners in a comedy club, sometimes at the expense of some poorly dressed oddity at the grocery store or, more often, at his own expense. But last year, while attending a professional workshop at Google corporate headquarters in California, he was inspired to lunatic heights:
at google, everyone works out. everyone. and they have to because of all the stairs. at google, there is a yellow brick road. and legos. the first rule of google is you don't talk about google.
"It gets my creative juices going," May says. "I get up in the morning and think, 'What's the most ridiculous thing I could put out there?' I know a lot of funny people, and you wait to see them respond to it."
And respond they do. May is a minor star of sorts on Facebook, not just because he has a more-than-respectable 1,000 friends - many of them real-life fans of his company, Stray Cat Theatre - but because his prolific posts are routinely "liked" and commented on by his friends, making his miniature rants more likely to show up high in other Facebook users' news feeds, in turn leading to even more likes and comments.
WILD MEDIA FRONTIER
It shouldn't be a surprise that artists, authors and journalists are among those who have integrated social media into their already semi-public work lives. Take Bob Boze Bell, who is all three, as well as owner and editor of True West magazine. He uses his 3,000-plus Facebook friends as an instant focus group to see whether a particular topic (say, Custer's Last Stand) is popular and to find sources for a story.
"I'll put up a proposed story on something, and the real experts - the 20 people who spent their whole lives just on the OK Corral - are all right there," Bell says.
"Yes, I try to shape a persona" online, he adds. "It's very similar to what I did on the radio, or the cartoons I did for New Times. I learned how to get a conversation going, which is what we're all in the business of."
And now, thanks to Facebook, millions more of us are in the same business, even if the competition isn't over dollars but merely over each other's attention.
"Everybody's got a career (online) now," Bell says. "What used to be David Letterman's territory, now there are 50,000 people in that zone. And maybe it's the equivalent of having a radio show in Kingman, but the playing field has been really leveled."
WEB DOMINATION
Of course, not everyone would be wise to crack wise online; the familiar advice for college students to avoid posting party pics where potential employers might someday find them is just the most obvious risk. (Check out: 25 things I hate about Facebook) Ron May's brash and irreverent style fits hand-in-glove with his theater's indie reputation, but many others prefer to limit their Facebook circle to close friends and family, and perhaps to use LinkedIn for professional networking.
Another approach is to take the social out of social networking and make it all business, all the time. After all, corporate America is all over social media (Coca-Cola is "liked" by 12 million on Facebook), so people are getting more and more used to commercial or business messages on social media - for better or worse.
If you're a professional looking to go that route, you might consider hiring a consultant, such as Lorrie Thomas, CEO of Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Web Marketing Therapy. She specializes in helping clients become their own brand, or a "weblebrity: someone who uses the Web to position themselves as an expert or authority on a certain subject," she explains.
Thomas calls her approach "TWD," for total web domination. As an example, she points to Ann Levine, a consultant who helps would-be attorneys hone their applications to law schools.
"There are a lot of Ann Levines in the world," Thomas says, "but if you Google that name, she is the top three or four hits" - including her Twitter feed. And she's even No. 1 if you misspell her name "Anne."
DIGITAL DOWNSIDES
If total web domination sounds a bit much, well, it's not how most people are using social media. Still, Facebook users do have to be conscious about that side of their lives whenever they decide whether to accept a friend request.
Sherrie Madia, consultant and author of "The Social Media Survival Guide," thinks it's important to take a conscious, cautious approach, stressing the utility of social media in making contacts that might lead to a job, but also the dangers if you don't think before you post.
"It's very different from what we've done before," she says. "We didn't need to be a brand ourselves, we didn't need an online presence. But it's a great opportunity to create some distinction in the marketplace."
For some, however, social media's rapid takeover of our personal and professional lives is cause for concern. One of them is Mitra, the Wake Forest communications professor.
"Facebook, or any social media, really, has erased that difference between the public and the private," he says. "You tell your story through . . . bits of digital information that you voluntarily leave on a social-media site. But the real twist to it is: You are not always in control."
This is a consequence of the collaborative nature of social media. Once you've posted a profile picture or a status update, there's a good chance it will continue to exist in "the cloud," the millions of computing nodes that make up the Internet.
Somewhat whimsically, Mitra calls these digital morsels "narbs," for narrative bits. And your online identity might include narrative bits contributed to the social media by other people - for example, by posting a photo of you and "tagging" it with your name - for anyone else to find. Potentially, it's the digital equivalent of gossip, except with text and visuals, and probably permanent.
"You are not always in control of your identity narrative," Mitra says. "You do not control your narbs."
THE NEW NORMAL
The creators of "South Park," who always have their fingers on the pulse of the zeitgeist (usually by way of the jugular), satirized this new reality with an episode earlier this year titled "You Have 0 Friends," in which Stan must enter his computer, a la "Tron," to do battle with his own Facebook profile.
Such cyber anxieties, a reflection of the phenomenal pace of the social-media revolution, are sure to continue as technology and the ways we use it evolve.
But for many of Facebook's 500 million users, not to mention the compulsive tweeters and anybody who's competing to be the Mayor of anywhere on Foursquare, the biggest fear is not that our digital personas will take on a life of their own, but that they will take over our own lives.
"It's so part of my daily everything now," Stray Cat's May says with a laugh, "it's kind of creepy."
Reach the reporter at kerry.lengel@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4896.
Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/thingstodo/stage/articles/2010/10/02/20101002facebook-social-media-power-500-million-friends-web-network.html#ixzz11J1fNhYa
No comments:
Post a Comment