If I don't watch TV, it doesn't matter much to me if all my friends are. If I'm not on Facebook and all my friends are, I may miss out a lot of social interaction I'd otherwise participate in, and which might occur somewhere elsewhere from Facebook if more people from my social circle weren't on it. So it looks like it'll benefit me more if I can make other people not do the thing by announcing I'm not doing it for Facebook than for TV.
> I may miss out a lot of social interaction I'd otherwise participate in
The thing I believe about Facebook is that it's usage figures are driven by an underlying fear in those that use it that they may miss out on some social event between their friends.
I have three further beliefs in this area: 1) That Facebook is becoming the new TV in terms of using cognitive surplus and 2) that it is becoming the media in which people wait for a shared social event (see below), and 3) that games within Facebook are used because of the fear of missing a shared social event.
To the latter first, if people are on Facebook and stuff is changing ever so subtly all the while, then the people feel a sense of anticipation that something may happen, and they really don't want to be the one person in their social group to miss it. They play Farmville because it passes the time and amuses them, but they only do so because it is within Facebook. They would not leave Facebook to play Farmville as Facebook is where the social event will appear and that is what they don't want to miss. So Farmville and other games within Facebook are used by those who fear missing a social event as a tool to help justify to themselves staying on Facebook waiting for the social event.
To the second, TV used to deliver social events. In the UK many people still recall the first time that they saw Boy George on Top Of The Pops and the chat across the country the next day. It was a shared social event that works because everyone witnesses it at the same time. The fragmentation of TV from the few terrestrial channels into hundreds of channels and the rise of the internet have both heavily diluted the ability for TV to deliver this king of shared social event. Aside from X Factor train wrecks, not much can be relied upon to have been seen by the majority of your social circle.
And to the first I was at a Facebook sales presentation only yesterday in Covent Garden and some fantastical statistic was quoted along the lines of "X billion minutes are spent on Facebook each month". In my head I heard the word "wasted" rather than "spent" and recalled Clay Shirky's rant on this http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for... better distilled here as the key quote http://www.cybersoc.com/2008/07/clay-shirky-tal.html . Facebook now consumes the cognitive surplus that TV used to monopolise. 28 minutes on average, every Facebook user spends on Facebook every day (number taken from yesterday's presentation).
To me, not using Facebook is to say that I'm alright about, and not afraid of, missing the next shared social event in my circle of friends. It's saying that I'm OK working on other things in my spare time (projects, or doing stuff with my girl) rather than burning through my cognitive surplus with nothing to show for it. For me, not being on Facebook is a statement about being proactive in my life, to make the most of it.
So when people ask why I'm not on Facebook, I tell them how I see it is a fear-driven thing that would consume my time and give me little in return.
I share some of the same concerns as per the article, but more than that I want to use my life as best I can. For the same kind of reasons that I don't watch TV (not being afraid of missing the next shared social event) I don't use Facebook.
Strangely, I don't feel that about Twitter. Twitter isn't a tool that appears to be driven by fear of missing something, the very temporary nature of it's updates passing by in a stream mean that it's inevitable that you miss things. Instead Twitter feels to me more about sharing and inspiring others, it's information dissemination rather than a magnet for shared social events. I'm on Twitter, and I use it as a creative tool to feed ideas about things to try and do.
Now I wonder whether the author of the article is on Twitter, as most of his arguments could be used there too... in which case are they really the reason he's not on Facebook?
Oh, and the reason I think that shopping on Facebook makes sense? Because of course if you let people do their shopping in the time that they have available whilst they wait for that shared social event. Then yeah, they'll rather do that than leave Facebook and do it elsewhere.
The rule for success on Facebook given all of this: Allow whatever you provide as a service (shopping, gambling, games, etc) to be interruptible.
Your service isn't why people are there, but they'll do it whilst they're waiting. But if that shared social event emerges in the midst of grocery shopping or game play, then your service must allow them to instantly stop things.
