I say my best intentions because for all intents and purposes, Facebook is passé, a has-been, shelved. I don’t want to be tied to this relic of the Web 2.0 era, pottering around with grandparents and long-forgotten “friends”! I want my social media interactions to be bleeding edge, part of the zeitgeist, not part of a poltergeist that keeps flipping up personal news I don’t care about and causes I don’t want to follow.
But the truth is, Facebook does it so damn well. And it’s ever-changing, never happy to stay still. Along with its major change to the news feed algorithm which commenced in January this year, there have been improvements to analytics, constant tweaks to the interface, and the most surprising to me, the ability to upload and share documents. Share documents?! Facebook is unstoppable, and clearly aims to be the ubiquitous social media network that everyone has to have, even if they don’t like it too much. Like Telstra. Or pod coffee machines.
Facebook's evolution. 2004 to the left, 2014 above. See the full slideshow. |
Because teens love to socialise. Here’s an interesting guide to what’s out there in the teen space right now, albeit with a whiff of censure. Needless to say, the options are growing, the pathways becoming more convoluted, and the targets more niche-marketed. As has ever been the case with parenting or education, it’s what you don’t know about that you need to worry about. The “known unknowns” as a former US Secretary of State once said. We can’t possibly be across the technology enough to learn or join every social network and be able to make an educated decision regarding our kids’ usage.
Some parents adopt a laissez-faire attitude: “they’re going to find it anyway so why bother monitoring them”. Some are more circumspect: “I’m nervous, what about all the risks? Best to wait until they’re older.” Some are plain ignorant: “I don’t really understand the technology, and I don’t want to, so I’ll just let them/won’t let them do it”. I’m lucky, I guess, I study this stuff so I know the risks and the benefits: my 11-year old son will be waiting until he’s 13 and can join Facebook “legally”, if he still wants to. I allow some low-level interaction on Instagram (after a terrible phone call from a disgruntled father last year and the subsequent six-month ban on using it) and log onto his device regularly to keep an eye on what’s going on there. That was the rule we agreed upon to allow him back on.
Meanwhile, we adults receive regular breathless announcements that somebody has created “the new Facebook”. A recent article lists The 7 Best Facebook Alternatives You Didn’t Know About, mainly because they are either really new or nobody much is using them. In fact, Wikipedia lists almost 200 active social networking websites (and a smaller number of defunct ones) and the user numbers for many of these, with 15 claiming over 100 million active users each, an amazing, if arguable statistic. Some of these alternatives look interesting, but again, they have attempted to garner support from niche users, like Untappd, pictured below, which appeals to beer drinkers and encourages them to share bars and beers, discover others, and stay engaged through gamification.
Which brings me back to my rediscovered Facebook crush. I’ve had to use it for units in most of my course, so sort of begrudgingly returned to it after losing interest a few years back when ads were introduced. Now ads are ubiquitous (anyone know a hack to turn them off?) but I’ve stopped caring. I’m actually reading my News Feed daily (as well as dropping in on my unit pages) and commenting more, wishing people happy birthday, even sharing jokes and memes and other posts myself.
Facebook: it’s familiar, it’s easy, it just works. Now that we can share documents it threatens to make obsolete Dropbox and OneDrive, even emails. Of course it will continue to grow and insinuate itself into our lives. More acquisitions, the integration of VR, the potential to add an eBay-like purchasing function, one commentator quotes employees of Facebook stating they are “only 1 percent through their ‘journey’”. Of course there will always be naysayers and hipsters who eschew Facebook's soporific shades-of-blue sameness. I’m sure I will steer away from it again too. But while ever university courses recommend it, Prime Ministers and Presidents promote it, and all your (22+ year old) friends are on it, Facebook will remain the one social network to rule them all.
Now I just need to find the love for Twitter.