Facebook and the various other social apps do in fact address serious societal problems and needs.
There's been a trend for several decades of people in modern society growing further apart. It's been lamented at great length in numerous studies and publications. It's a natural consequence of the other choices our societies are making, becoming more mobile in both work and home. People move more than they did, they change jobs more than they did, and thus they change social circles more than they did.
Social Networks compensate for all that. They do in fact bring people closer together than they would be otherwise. Certainly much of the interaction appears superficial, but if you think that indicates it's meaningless, that's because you don't understand social interaction. Even casual, seemingly superficial interactions bring us closer. They help us define our communities.
On Facebook I'm friends with people I haven't seen in 20+ years. Yes, most of our interactions seem superficial. But they aren't just that, they're tying us all closer to where we came from. And sometime it's more than that. That friend of yours from high school struggling with cancer? It means something to them that 50 people post well wishes weekly. It helps them. It's meaningful.
I lost track of many people in my life, without really meaning to. It's just how things work. Facebook et al help me correct that. They keep me in touch. Sure I have my "real-life" friends, but it's also nice to have the extended group.
I lost track of these people. My 13 year old niece will never lose track of someone unless she wants to. Think about that. Tell me that's not transformative.
From the article, "Those relatively comfortable “problems” of modern life have already been solved to death, beginning with Alexander Bell and ending (sort of, for now) with Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
Many of the apps we have nowadays — the successful ones, at least — revolve around game mechanics, addiction, self-reference, and narcissism. Even apps I use and actually like quite a lot fall into this category."
A more charitable reading would take it to mean that the problem of social connection is important, but it's been adequately addressed by Facebook, and /new/ startups shouldn't focus on it.
The most charitable reading I can give it still has it missing the point and not understanding what it is that's being built up with all these companies.
Facebook, as I've said, restores and maintains social connections. This is absolutely not a minor thing, it's life-altering. Perhaps it's too early on in the process to understand that, but 10 or 20 years from now, everyone will get it when they look at who has been around and what they've shared as experiences.
Twitter is the global hive-mind. It tracks what everyone in the world is thinking about, or at least it or its successor will when extends its reach that far. Yes, most of that is shallow, because most of what most of us think about is shallow. Duh. That's sort of by definition if you think that through for five minutes. If we were all deeper, then the norm would be redefined and we'd all seem shallow again. Twitter succeeds at capturing the hive-mind specifically because it is so short. Your immediate thoughts are immediate, they're bite sized. The format matches the format of your thinking. There's value in knowing what people are thinking, though of course that value will be applied in different ways.
Foursquare is a few things. One, it's designed as a universal customer loyalty system on its primary level. I suppose if you think commerce is of necessity shallow, you can dismiss this as meaningless. Of course, it does give the small niche businesses a tool to level the playing field, but even that's probably not enough for some. But what about this- it's also restoring a sense of place to urban and suburban environments. There's a trackable history of who was where and when. It's not as disjointed as it was, there's a throughline. "Oh", you might say, "Bob goes to the same coffee shop I do, but three hours later". Now you're closer to Bob, and the coffee shop has more history for you.
Yeah, ok, none of this is curing cancer, but it does matter, it does make a difference, and it does improve people's lives.
You can tell me it's meaningless, but you're wrong.
> It tracks what everyone in the world is thinking about
I think her point was that it doesn't track what everyone in the world is thinking about. It tracks what everyone wealthy enough to have the free time to commit to maintaining their social network presence is thinking about.
> universal customer loyalty system
2.4 billion people (about a quarter of the planet) make less than $1000 year. Only 500 million people's income exceeds $11,500 a year. (http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/income.php)
It is extremely significant that the businesses she picks on (not saying it's fair to call other folks' life's work pointless) focus on creating narrower and narrower slices of the 500 million. The 90% of the planet (!) that lives on less than $11000 a year is completely untouched by customer loyalty programs and social connections apps.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that the businesses you mentioned aren't doing the things you say they are. My life is richer because of the internet and specifically social networking. I am arguing, similar to the author, that the work Silicon Valley seems to be dedicated and that seems to get the most attention is not solving problems most of the world has.
Well. Sometimes, you can only best solve problems you understand. And those that you understand best are usually the ones you experience yourself. Many of us have the luxury of being healthy and well-fed, so that's not the problems we focus on.
And were this written in 2004, would you have said social connection is adequately addressed by Friendster and MySpace?
Just as Alta Vista was not the last word on search (nor is Google for that matter), Facebook is not the last word on Social Networks.
I think there's something to be said, however, about digging by following your own sense of curiosity and intuition about good problems to solve, instead of seeing where everyone else is digging and just digging there.
Use your noggin and explore. If it happens that no one else is digging there, so be it. And if that's what the OP is encouraging, then I'm all for that. But I don't feel there's a need to discount the current range of problems being solved.
I think this also has to do with more people underestimating the trend you refer to than overestimating it. I think what this means is that because of the pace of technology, we have things that go from an idea in someone's head into an ecosystem of businesses, applications and technologies in just a few years. The ability to rapidly develop and share what we've built lets people fill in the gaps from deep meaningful, concepts like "never lose track of your friends" all the way to "Mary gained 20 points on farmville today" so quickly that it's hard not to mix them up as being one in the same.
I'd argue that this is similar to the car going from "new sector of transportation, economy, and way of life" all the way to "now with rust-proof undercoating with 0 down, 0% APR and $1000 Cash back", just much more quickly. If you were to look at the automobile industry after the arrival of the used car salesman as a solved problem due to the abundance of its superficialities, you'd miss the opportunity to build the hybrid car, the Smart car, the electric car, the hydrogen car and more, and all of the smaller incremental yet meaningful advances in car safety and technology over the years. In the larger scheme of things, Facebook is probably the model T of social networks...
For me, Facebook has shown me not to feel bad about losing track of people. I have most of them on Facebook now and no matter what I say no one even responds.
The OP is talking about getting "work" done, like solving cancer. The "togetherness" stuff can be defined as entertainment. Watching movies and playing games is meaningful, as is staying in touch with friends, but these things don't make the trains run on time.
Most of us would like to survive cancer so we can spend more time doing togetherness things with our friends and family. I've never seen an argument about whether various pursuits were worthwhile or not that was itself worthwhile. Its simply a topic that doesn't bear inspection, if it puts food on you and your families table then its worthwhile enough for me.
Facebook and the various other social apps do in fact address serious societal problems and needs.
There's been a trend for several decades of people in modern society growing further apart. It's been lamented at great length in numerous studies and publications. It's a natural consequence of the other choices our societies are making, becoming more mobile in both work and home. People move more than they did, they change jobs more than they did, and thus they change social circles more than they did.
Social Networks compensate for all that. They do in fact bring people closer together than they would be otherwise. Certainly much of the interaction appears superficial, but if you think that indicates it's meaningless, that's because you don't understand social interaction. Even casual, seemingly superficial interactions bring us closer. They help us define our communities.
On Facebook I'm friends with people I haven't seen in 20+ years. Yes, most of our interactions seem superficial. But they aren't just that, they're tying us all closer to where we came from. And sometime it's more than that. That friend of yours from high school struggling with cancer? It means something to them that 50 people post well wishes weekly. It helps them. It's meaningful.
I lost track of many people in my life, without really meaning to. It's just how things work. Facebook et al help me correct that. They keep me in touch. Sure I have my "real-life" friends, but it's also nice to have the extended group.
I lost track of these people. My 13 year old niece will never lose track of someone unless she wants to. Think about that. Tell me that's not transformative.
Shallow thinking.