It’s time to make a confession - all of us have done it – we quite like turning off our mobile phones.
Despite the flurry of recent stats claiming people feel physical pain if they cannot access their emails/ Twitter/Facebook accounts, many of us like being incommunicado. No more waiting for that ping which announces a new email and makes everyone around simultaneously wince and reach for their Smartphones.
Which of us doesn’t like being unreachable from time-to-time? But this is rapidly becoming a social taboo. It is now unacceptable to refuse to be a part of our huge and (definitely not brave, judging by the trolls) new world – the online community.
How far will this take us and most importantly, have we really thought about what this ‘brave new world’ will look like?
Facebook has been open about its long-term plan to take over the online world. Zuckerberg is aiming to turn Facebook into an omnipresent platform which influences what we buy, who we listen to and how we interact.
By picking up the breadcrumbs collected from the activities, links and likes that we all generate, Facebook should be able to predict what we're most likely to engage with, be it books or the latest diet.
But at what stage does this turn us into automatons or puppets? And how do we know who is pulling the strings?
At this stage, we know that advertisers have failed to buy into the idea that Facebook could be a channel for successfully advertising products in any traditional way, following the disappointing performance of the recently launched Facebook shares.
Whether this is a genuine scepticism of how effective Facebook is as an advertising vehicle, or simply a smear campaign, the trend is still clear – advertising is not the best commercial use of social media.
The ultimate question is what to do with all that extremely valuable data and how to regulate one entity? The answer isn’t clear yet, but to take a guess, we would say that Facebook will establish itself as a mainframe to host partner services run by companies which have an interest in collecting data based on the behaviour of their customers. For example, partners such as Spotify, LinkedIn and Pinterest, will operate within Facebook where they offer a great service at a price – the price being data collection and distribution to third parties.
These partners will ensure that every aspect of our social and commercial life can be found on Facebook, meaning it will be difficult to opt out in order to fully function in modern society. We will no longer be able to make a decision, visit a place or apply for a job without being watched, monitored and tagged by a huge network of companies. This consumer behaviour will be used as the basis to decide all future commercial and non-commercial ventures.
It’s therefore up to us to decide whether this gives the general public the ultimate power, or ultimately become enslaved within an online world of our own making.
A more long term - and worrying - development, is the planned expansion of Facebook currency. This is currently worth 15% of Facebook revenue and is a method of payment to for example, play Facebook games. But online evolution could see this extend to the official currency of the internet, which is a significant power for any individual country - let alone a company.
