dna edit: The way we speak

With its tenth anniversary rolling around, Facebook has quietly doddered into senior citizen territory in technological terms. Obsolescence is one of the constants of the internet and technology in general; a necessity for forward movement. In that context, a decade is a very long time indeed. A decade at the top — and Facebook’s star rose very fast indeed after Mark Zuckerberg founded it in 2004 — is even more remarkable. Facebook’s full significance extends far beyond the terms of its success. It has impacted the internet, digital communication and popular culture in profound ways with the attendant ripple effects spreading in multiple arenas. And while it has become fashionable over the past year or so to predict its impending doom with rival social networks such as Snapchat, Tumblr, Pinterest and others gaining traction, there is no empirical evidence to suggest that Facebook is anywhere near done yet.

There were social networks before Facebook, of course. Myspace was the biggest, a behemoth that seemed unlikely to be dethroned anytime in the near future. That Facebook managed to do as quickly as it did is perhaps down to one particular innovation —  allowing the average user to publish for a wide audience. When it was first founded in 2004 as a network for students of Ivy League universities in the US, and even in the two years after that when it spread to other universities across the country, Facebook was simply a collection of individual pages like social networking sites before it. But its introduction of the news feed feature in 2006 — where every user could see an aggregation of information posted by everyone from friends to other users of the site in general —  was a game-changer in multiple ways.

The news feed was the progenitor of something that is taken for granted now — the ability to reach a wide audience on the internet. In effect, it democratised digital communication. The impact of this cannot be overstated. In a cultural sense, it has lowered barriers and inhibitions when it comes to sharing personal information. Whether this is a net positive or negative depends on perspective; what is certain is its impact on everything from celebrity culture to social mores. It has been if anything even more disruptive politically. Across the word, social media — in other words, Facebook and Twitter, and while counter-factuals are inherently tricky, it is difficult to see the latter succeeding in form and function without the former to break the trail — has become a default component of political strategies. From Barack Obama to AAP, successful campaigns have depended on it; from Iran to Egypt, it has made protest movements possible.

But Facebook’s strategies have also made people comfortable with the idea of having reams of personal information controlled by corporate entities. With the scope for the state co-opting those entities as has happened in the US — or simply for the corporations themselves to use that information in multiple ways — it remains to be seen whether there will be a moment of reckoning or a quiet slide into accepting this lack of privacy as the standard. Until then, Facebook can take both blame and credit for the construction of the current paradigm.