The world is changing rapidly right under our noses. The rate of technological progress accelerates each year, and very few of us are stopping to think of the repercussions.
Facebook has completely reinvented the way all of us communicate on a daily basis. Since launching in 2004, Facebook has amassed hundreds of million users worldwide — a staggering amount of growth in just seven years. One in 10 people on the planet have a Facebook account. The overwhelming majority of our generation can easily recall when Facebook didn’t exist at all, but in such a remarkably short time, it has become something that no one in society can function without.
People the world over have begun to rely on Facebook almost exclusively in order to keep track of their upcoming events and maintain contact with family, friends and acquaintances; many have even abandoned traditional email in lieu of Facebook’s messaging services.
Some smartphone users actually opt to get ahold of someone through Facebook’s mobile app, rather than simply making a call. As Facebook grows, steadily devouring all modes of communication, one question comes to mind: At what point, if any, will it stop?
We’re already in the dangerous routine of uploading massive quantities of data to Facebook’s servers. Each picture a user uploads, every comment they post — truly, anything that a user does is recorded. It is obvious that Facebook isn’t going anywhere in the next few decades.
All of that user-generated material will simply build up — we can only guess what will happen when we reach age 40, let alone age 60.
Will they still log in to the same account, with the same credentials, and the same photo albums they first created when they were in high school, now covered with digital cobwebs? A user’s cyberspatial footprint can become very large, very fast — and corporations have definitely taken notice.
The Los Angeles Times reports that, “Facebook's new Sponsored Stories feature will allow companies to take any user content — such as status updates… and turn that content into an advertisement … on the social networking website.”
Major companies, such as Ford and Budweiser, have begun to fizzle out advertisements which sign-off with a link to an official brand website in favor of linking to a Facebook page with a straightforward, “Find us on Facebook!”
They even go so far as to display the Facebook logo directly beneath their own. It is a clever move on the part of big brands. They’re hitting their consumer base right where they already are — Facebook, where users log in multiple times a day and are subject to receive a steady stream of ads and updates, intermingled with the content they’re already seeing on their News Feed.
Facebook has announced that a new feature called “Timeline” will arrive in the coming weeks, which will enable users to learn what others were up to in any specific month of any specific year — a scary thought when we realize Facebook could go on forever.
Despite its sinister, Orwellian “1984”-like technology, it can’t be ignored that Facebook can do great things for humankind — take the recent revolution in Egypt, for example.
But at the same time, it has the potential to eradicate our rights to privacy. Facebook changed global communication entirely, and while it could leave Mark Zuckerberg’s hands one day, or perhaps go by a different name, one thing is certain — it will keep growing, for better or worse.
Reach the columnist at jwadler@asu.edu Click here to subscribe to the daily State Press newsletter.
