. "What created the revolutions was that there were a large number of people who were willing to go to jail or die."There's no question that a service with 600 million subscribers, half of whom check in daily, 200 million of whom check in using a mobile device, there's no question that such a service is a really big deal. How big is the problem. Clay Shirky noted that there is no metaphor for Facebook. Anything we do, then, to bring it a size that we can comprehend is bound to omit a lot of salient detail. Tracy Kidder's The Soul of A New Machine
included a watershed observation. Computer systems in the late 1970s reached a point where no one engineer could understand how the whole thing worked. Thirty years of Moore's Law
later,we're presented with something that isn't just about transistors, but about people and how they relate to and with computing and networks.Most people, Kirkpatrick noted, signed up for Facebook so that they could meet friends at the mall, not to start revolutions. And what makes Facebook so revolutionary in its own right, he continued, is that Facebook is built on real identities and the relationships of real people. The complex software that uses your profile information and your interactions with your friends results in a place where people feel as though they belong.
It's more than a coincidence that social networks have become a major way that stay close to family and friends at the same time that, worldwide, a majority of people now live in urban areas. It's a lot easier to be anonymous in a city where few people know you and even fewer care. We claim that we want privacy, anonymity, and personal distance while we hurry to check what folks are saying to and about us online.
This transparency is at the core of the Facebook philosophy and its effect. If we are more transparent, the belief holds, we will ultimately be less judgmental and more effective in work and in friendship. These notions can be unsettling those of us over 30 (often doubly or more over 30) who have grown up with an attitude of opacity. Just as of a certain age often cannot imagine how we'd find comfort in a world of Facebook, increasing numbers of young people cannot imagine a world without it.
Using real identities, of course, can be dangerous. "It takes a lot of bravery to be a Facebook activist," Kirkpatrick observed. The Egyptian police had and certainly still have a special detachment to investigate activities on Facebook and other social networking channels. China doesn't even bother with that; they just don't allow it.
The engineers at Facebook, led by Mark Zuckerberg ("the most confident person I've met in the world so far"), designed and built a system that scaled beyond their imaginations. Using open source software, because that's all they could afford, the engineers could easily internationalize Facebook, allowing users to translate components as needed. As a result, 90% of the people in the world can or could use Facebook in a language that they understand.
This worldwide growth is often lost on Americans. The country with the second largest number of Facebook users is Indonesia. Even if we were fluent in Indonesian, our view of Facebook, however, is based on our interests, our friends, our community as we define it. Those who seek out the wider world can find it, but most of us don't.
In the 90s, the hot software products were groupware, exemplified by Lotus Notes. Workers could collaborate on projects as needed, share documents, data, and messages, and build ad hoc teams to solve difficult problems. Time and again, studies showed that groupware worked and yet it failed. Kirkpatrick, a writer at Fortune for 25 years, said that managers couldn't deal with the loss of control and so they failed to deploy the products on any consistent basis.
Facebook and its kin, LinkedIn, Twitter, blogs, and other channels, became the new groupware. People connected with friends, with businesses, and with ideas without necessarily involving the boss. The result is that the workplace has changed even as management tries to control it. (Many workplaces block access to Facebook, overlooking the fact that 1/3 of Facebook users access the site by mobile devices.)
Kirkpatrick was at Davos when the events in Egypt were reaching full boil. A board member of a very large I.T. company told how the CEO of said company was watching the news and listened to complaints of the protesters. The CEO, after a time of reflection, said, "I have to be a lot more transparent in my leadership."
The presentation and discussion was sponsored by the Amherst alumni associations of Boston and Central Massachusetts and took place on February 17, 2011 at the Spellman Museum of Stamps and Postal History at Regis College.
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