metalangel
16-06-11, 08:04 AM
Some think so:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/willheaven/100092236/is-this-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-facebook/
The bad news for Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 27-year-old billionaire creator, is that many people are doing just that. They’re using Facebook less, or leaving it altogether – which is known, would you believe it, as “Facebook suicide”.
Figures show that 100,000 British users deactivated their accounts during May, reducing the total number to 29.8 million. And six million logged off for good in the United States. What started off as an exclusive online social club at Harvard University has saturated Western society. Now it could be on the way down.
Facebook suicide is still too bold a move for some. It would be unthinkable for a 16-year-old to kick the habit. Your teenage children might tell you they are “revising” for exams upstairs, but how many hours have they frittered away, sharing hilarious YouTube clips with friends or “poking” each other? For this crowd, Facebook has penetrated every facet of their lives. It is how they communicate (they don’t use email or text messages). It is how they swap articles and videos. As one technology writer put it recently, for them “it’s becoming a web of its own”. Just as Zuckerberg planned.
For others, young twentysomething professionals, for example, it’s a lot easier to quit. My friends use Facebook as a kind of address book, a back-up to their iPhones. At university, we would compulsively check the website because everybody else did. But these days, indifference is catching on. It’s a social epidemic in reverse.
There’s one over-riding reason for this: once you’ve entered the world of work, concerns for privacy become more urgent. That midnight skinny dip at the Majorca beach party was a laugh – but there’s no need to share it with your boss. The dangers of thoughtless social networking apply to all, whether you’re a soldier in Afghanistan, or an over-friendly juror in Manchester.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/willheaven/100092236/is-this-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-facebook/
The bad news for Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 27-year-old billionaire creator, is that many people are doing just that. They’re using Facebook less, or leaving it altogether – which is known, would you believe it, as “Facebook suicide”.
Figures show that 100,000 British users deactivated their accounts during May, reducing the total number to 29.8 million. And six million logged off for good in the United States. What started off as an exclusive online social club at Harvard University has saturated Western society. Now it could be on the way down.
Facebook suicide is still too bold a move for some. It would be unthinkable for a 16-year-old to kick the habit. Your teenage children might tell you they are “revising” for exams upstairs, but how many hours have they frittered away, sharing hilarious YouTube clips with friends or “poking” each other? For this crowd, Facebook has penetrated every facet of their lives. It is how they communicate (they don’t use email or text messages). It is how they swap articles and videos. As one technology writer put it recently, for them “it’s becoming a web of its own”. Just as Zuckerberg planned.
For others, young twentysomething professionals, for example, it’s a lot easier to quit. My friends use Facebook as a kind of address book, a back-up to their iPhones. At university, we would compulsively check the website because everybody else did. But these days, indifference is catching on. It’s a social epidemic in reverse.
There’s one over-riding reason for this: once you’ve entered the world of work, concerns for privacy become more urgent. That midnight skinny dip at the Majorca beach party was a laugh – but there’s no need to share it with your boss. The dangers of thoughtless social networking apply to all, whether you’re a soldier in Afghanistan, or an over-friendly juror in Manchester.