The Nobel winning
economist Paul Krugman once said: “The
growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's
law" ….which states that the number of potential connections in a network
is proportional to the square of the number of participants, becomes apparent:
most people have nothing to say to each other!”
Is this comment valid, especially in the context of social media? Do
people really have that much to say to one another? Is there a deep well of
nascent verbiage advanced only by the latest techno evolution?
Social media growth is staggering. The latest figures suggest that
Facebook has 1.3 billion users. Add to that 350 million LinkedIn profiles and
a few hundred million for the balance of “smaller” platforms and it is easy to
arrive at 2 billion social media profiles, give or take a few million for
duplication.
Psychologists have spent time exploring the narcissistic component of
social media. It is said that we have 2 selves: the “now self” and the
“possible self” (Markus and Nurius 1987). The internet allows a person to
become their “possible self” or at least a version close to it. And there is evidence that Facebook
usage is associated with narcissism. Every narcissist needs a reflecting pool. Just
as Narcissus gazed into the pool to admire his beauty, social networking sites have become our modern-day pool.
Putting it bluntly, the 2 billion social media profiles are 2 billion
channels of ME. The writer and
social commentator, Charles Hugh Smith, described this saying that with a captive
global audience everyone now has the opportunity to launch their own channel.
Two billion new media channels and of course …. a glut of mediocre content … including
selfies.
Scarcity creates value. The vast surplus of social media content easily
reduces its value to zero, perhaps less. To counter this vacuum of value people
seek “Friends” and “Connections” and try to build a robust “audience” for ME. Is this truly the environment that
advertisers seek? A glance through the Nielsen archives revealed some work done
in late 2013 showing that media environment still impacts perceived ad
credibility (as it has always done) with social media languishing at the bottom
of the hierarchy.
|
Nielsen
Consumer Trust in Advertising 2013
|
|
|
Word of mouth
|
84%
|
|
Branded websites
|
69%
|
|
Consumers opinions posted online
|
68%
|
|
Editorial content such as newspaper articles
|
67%
|
|
TV ads
|
62%
|
|
Brand sponsorships
|
61%
|
|
Newspaper ads
|
61%
|
|
Ads in magazines
|
60%
|
|
Billboards
|
57%
|
|
Ads on radio
|
57%
|
|
Emails signed up for
|
56%
|
|
Ads before movies
|
56%
|
|
TV programme product placement
|
55%
|
|
Ads in search engine results
|
48%
|
|
Online video ads
|
48%
|
|
Ads in
social networks
|
48%
|
|
Display ads on mobile devices
|
45%
|
|
Online banner ads
|
42%
|
|
Text ads on mobile phones
|
37%
|
If it is truly narcissistic and if we really don’t have that much to say
to each other, it becomes easier to grasp that even behemoths such as Facebook
can stop growing or even decay. The latest figures from GlobalWebIndex suggest
this is happening in places:
GlobalWebIndex surveys 200,000 Internet users annually. If we
look at the top 10 social networks and compare Q4 2013 results against Q4 2014,
Facebook is the only one that saw a decline in
active user numbers.
So, what’s going on here? First, Facebook’s definition of an
active user is now so broad that you can do very little on the site and still
be counted within its figures. Secondly, and just as importantly,
GlobalWebIndex’s data shows that, while Facebook’s active user numbers are
undergoing consistent declines, its member and visitor numbers are either
holding steady or increasing. Clearly, we have a large group of
Facebookers who are checking the site but not actually contributing to it.
To find evidence for this, we need look no further than the U.S.
and U.K. (which, as Facebook’s oldest two markets, are typically seen as
bellwethers for wider trends). Of the 15,000 people we surveyed in these two
countries, half of Facebook’s members said they were using it less than before
(rising to two thirds among teens). The main reasons for this were pretty
revealing: A fifth said they were just not as interested in the site as they
used to be. A similar number said they were simply bored.
Was Paul Krugman right? Probably not. People like us, it seems, do have
a lot to say to each other. But we are choosing new ways of doing so.
Novelty, narcissistic fatigue, more efficient platforms? It’s difficult
to say but there is rapid media evolution. Perhaps it is the simpler
exchange/dialogue platforms that will drive the next growth phase. Perhaps we
are not that self-interested after all.
Rapidly growing platforms include QQ in China, WhatsApp and others such
as Instagram and Twitter.
What is certain is that things change quickly and despite its size and dominance
the future of Facebook and other social platforms is not beyond debate.
References
1 Buffardi, L. E., & Campbell, W. (2008). Narcissism and social networking web sites.Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin, 34, 1303-1314. doi:10.1177/0146167208320061
2 Mehdizadeh, S. (2010). Self-presentation 2.0: Narcissism and
self-esteem on Facebook.Cyberpsychology,
Behavior, and Social Networking, 357-364.
doi:10.1089/cyber.2009.0257
3 Ryan, T., & Xenos, S. (2011). Who uses Facebook? An
investigation into the relationship between the Big Five, shyness, narcissism, loneliness, and Facebook usage.Computers
in Human Behavior, 27, 1658-1664.
