In this week’s class, we
conducted a debate in whether Facebook will keep prevailing or will going down.
Many interesting points have been made in both side. Facebook’s ability in
adopting users, leaving legacy, providing non-treating way of staying contact,
and intertwining with different functions increases its chance to prevail.
However, the privacy issue and the change of generation are great forces that
work against it. The other problem with Facebook is the fact that people tend
to put positive information on it and they do not put negative news. An example
will be news of divorcing. Back to the era of phone and email, it was a lot easier
for a person to share his or her negative news to his or her best friends.
Nevertheless, with the lack of privacy in Facebook, people are less likely to
do so. Moreover, even if people do post things worth celebrating publicly on
the Facebook, the chance is that their best friends or relatives who took a
week off from Facebook or who doesn’t use it at all will miss them. In short,
Facebook has made some information exchange passive, now people have to find
out what happened to their friends by themselves. A very fascinating fact
during our in class debate is that groups in both ends of the debate actually
had the same argument with different entity fulfilling—it is all about
innovation versus disruptive innovation. According to the class, an example of
the disruptive innovation is when people in the bottom start taking marketing
shares from the entire industry. The tragedy of the company Black Berry is an
embodiment of this example. When the foundation of a business is taken, it
crumbles and falls; when Apple took all the bottom markets, they soon ran out
of business. In the end, we concluded our debate in that fact that for
companies that grew exponentially, we really have no idea what will happen to
it.
During the class, the
professor demonstrated a series of videos that shows how difficult was for
people to accept telephone back to the days. Back to 1835 when the idea of “far
speaking” was first introduced, people thought that “no one will ever use it.”
Nevertheless, the use of it grew exponentially. Today, the most common social
media tools we are using were all considered “unimaginable” a decade ago.
Therefore, for the future of our technology, we really have no idea today. The
idea of the “ambient awareness” that Facebook created was also discussed in the
class. According to the discussion, ambient light is an “available light in an
environment,” that is just there. Although Fackbook creates an illusion of been
“just right” in expressing ourselves and getting information from others, we
really don’t express and get much details from it. The fact that Facebook only
shares a little insight about a person makes the feeling of knowing others and
sharing oneself merely a beautiful illusion.
In the second period of
the class, we discussed how far have we came in social media? From 1984, the
first glace of Mac, to IPhone everywhere, and to the hypothetic video of the
future “a day made of glass,” we have indeed came a long way. According to the (doubtable)
statistics, in 2013, there were 1.73 million social media user and in the year
of 2008, the first social media president Obama was elected. Now social media
is a 180 billion dollars industry! Nevertheless, the impact of social media to
human beings in different aspects are still a subject under study.
Great job Su!
ReplyDelete