I am not on Facebook.
This is where you say….”What?!? You’re not on Facebook?” Or you say “Who’s not on Facebook?” And my favorite from those who know my profession, “But you work at a design firm.”
In the beginning, my design school was not on Facebook. In 2006, Facebook expanded registration to the public. By that point, I was sticking with the 80/20 rule. I exert 80% of my socializing energy to 20% of my network. This means more face to face conversations with friends and longer phone calls with family, leaving little emphasis on online participation. Now, I avoid joining because we are already seeing challenges around managing online identity, with Facebook and other social media at the core.
As features and preferences constantly emerge, controlling privacy and reputation have become more complex. How did we get to this point of complexity? How are people’s expectations shifting? And how are companies responding to these shifts in the digital age? We decided to look back in time to better understand how we got here and what’s to come.
How did we get here?
Taking a quick trip down memory lane, highlights two developments during the 70′s. First is that universities are conducting computing research with BBS (bulletin board systems) and timesharing terminals as a public effort with little commercialization. And the result of this is that accidental communities emerge online. Slowly but surely during the 80′s and 90′s people realize the potential power of the internet and set up a new industry. As internet accessibility grows in the 90′s, the industry goes further by providing more intimate, social choices. The newly commercialized LAN (local area networks) allows anyone to connect from their home. By this time, people are expressing themselves via instant messaging, abbreviations and emoticons. Social choices are further propelled by mobile-phones entering the market, however the mobile browsers we see during this decade are young, clunky and unusable.
Despite the deflating dot-com bubble of the 2000′s, social networking sites like Friendster and MySpace continue to emerge, pioneering the online connection of real world friends. In 2007, the iPhone redefines the mobile space, and hardware companies supply mobile-devices to the masses under great competitive pressure. People are constantly checking-in and uploading content to online communities in realtime, making battery life essential for all devices. Combining social networking sites and mass mobility forces us to reevaluate what is privacy moving forward.
So here we are today.
Everyone is constantly surrounded by the explosive use of social networks and connected, multimodal devices – the result: blurring of boundaries between online and offline identity. An avalanche of publicly available, consumer generated content and personal information is shared and searched for on the web. Hardware manufacturers are packing on the features and proliferating the creation and commoditization of all this personal data online. And the mobile devices we schlep around every day, drive life-caching of photos, videos, chats and tweets. This chaos is creating the need to de-clutter and brand personal identities to keep control when participating online.
What’s to come?
We see two major shifts that will bring up some issues and opportunities around reputation in the future. One shift is that experiences will converge as companies curate open-source content with an ecosystem of devices. Organizations beyond those in the internet services industry will attempt to leverage people’s reputations and online social capital. Hardware and service providers will elevate their designs and move beyond features for features’ sake. This rapidly changing, always converging landscape of products, services and information will make it even more difficult to know what information is shared and how your reputation is created, viewed, and judged on and offline.
The second major shift we think of as a new attitude towards online participation and refer to it as ‘give and take’. Since people will continually be motivated by the need to express and consume content, we will willingly give personal content to companies or other users and in return we will take credible content that provides value to our offline lives. This balance will hopefully create a form of trust and authenticity that we all want when sharing at a personal level.
So for now, I am content with staying off Facebook. But as the industry evolves and society’s expectations shift, I think more and more about joining the 800 million other people on Facebook. What do you think? Is there value in participating? How do you manage your online identity? Tweet us @Wallywants2know.
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