Value, Gift Glutting And The Future Of Facebook
As anyone traversing the blogosphere now knows, the impending value of Facebook has been significantly marred (and no, we’re not exactly speaking of its founder’s excessively sweaty, Nixonesqe moment). Such current events notwithstanding, the sustaining cultural implications of the site, both as a business- and social-interaction model, can be examined and analyzed through a number of criteria and criticisms.
Bruce Nussbaum of BusinessWeek recently explored the long-term effects of Facebook’s “fatal business model” in the Harvard Business Review.
In the piece, Nussbaum focuses on Facebook’s failure to recognize and act upon the shifting evolution of its users–from adolescence to adulthood:
“Facebook is wildly successful because its founder matched new social media technology to deep, Western cultural longing–the adolescent desire for connection to other adolescents in their own private space. There they can be free to design their personal identities without adult supervision. Think digital tree house. Generation Y accepted Facebook as a free gift and proceeded to connect, express, and visualize the embarrassing aspects of their young lives.”
The crux of Facebook’s mistake was thus adapting to its audience’s needs–to the always developing lifecycle of Millennial consumption habits–in which Nussbaum summed up in breaking three cultural norms:
- It is taking back a free gift. In order to build profits, Facebook has been commercializing and monetizing friendship networks. What Facebook gave to Millennials, it is now trying to take away. Millennials are resisting the invasion to their privacy.
- Facebook is ignoring the aging of the Millennials and the subsequent change in their culture. Older Gen Yers want less sociability and more privacy as actors outside their trusted cohort enter the Facebook space in search of information and connection. These older Millennials want more privacy tools for control of their information and networks.
- Facebook is behaving as though it owned not only its proprietary technology platform but the friendship networks created on it. It doesn’t. Millennials believe that ownership of their networks of friends belongs to them, not Facebook, and resist their commercialization.
The first norm, of taking back its “free gift,” serves as the thesis of Facebook’s elemental misstep. The move, while also admonishing the network’s known social and technological savvy, reminded us of Rob Walker’s recent talk at our PSFK Conference on generating value, and particularly his recent Consumed column on the gift economy.
Facebook invariably offered a connected community of gifters–those willing to exchange worth on an economy of personal deeds, desires and discussions. Based on a systematic value of, well, zero, what can such a product be worth?
Walker explains, with reference to Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift”:
“Think not just of written words but of images, artworks, videos, songs, craft how-to pages and on and on. Surely it’s the case that never before have so many creators offered so much to so many for $0. A result, in effect, is a gift glut.
‘He must create for himself that gift-sphere in which the work is made.’ This idea is illuminated, among other ways, by comparisons to tribal cultures that maintain social ties through the ritualized giving and sharing of ceremonial objects.
We tend to focus on the breakout successes of democratized culture-making. But there is also a great deal of creative expression out there of the type Hyde had in mind that nonetheless qualifies as an unwanted gift: the unlinked-to blog post, the unliked Facebook page, the unfavorited Flickr photo, the unwatched YouTube video, the unretweeted link and all the other expressions that are ignored or overlooked or simply not rewarded with positive feedback.”
So the question we must ask ourselves is, even though the brand promise–the systematic valuation of Facebook’s worth–has been compromised, how will we determine it for the future?
As outlined in Rob Walker’s Murketing blog, Rob Horning offered additional insight to gift glut in social media, which may provide an answer to where the future of Facebook is headed:
“In The Gift anthropologist Marcel Mauss gave some examples of gift-giving potlatches that culminate in the sheer destruction of value in obligatory ritualized sacrifices: ‘Sometimes there is no question of receiving return; one destroys simply in order to give the appearance that one has no desire to receive anything back.’
The result is that gifts proffered through social media stop seeming like gifts at all. They become referendums on our identity as we are configuring it in that particular instant. The gifts no longer seem reciprocal; they seem narcissistic. Even though we don’t do it for money, we are still back to producing content, not giving.”
Harvard Business Review: “Facebook’s Culture Problem May Be Fatal”
Daily Ideas & Inspiration Email