Surviving The Crossover Into Mass Culture

In the past year, Facebook has evolved from being an essential element of a student's life to becoming a mainstay of mainstream culture and the most popular website in Canada! In reading this article at CBC News I learned that Facebook is a disruptive forcen, in that it changes our ability to use and understand the internet in interactive ways that only a small minority have used before now. No longer limited to academic environments, can Facebook survive the crossover into mass culture and the pressures of commercialization?

1. Already, many people are using Facebook more often than e-mail as a primary means of communicating with friends and contacts online. With Facebook playing the role of a visual phone book, some people who have resisted signing up find that it can be the easiest — and at times only — means of reaching people.

2. An integral ingredient to this ongoing success and staying power lies in Facebook's decision to open up its social networking platform to developers in a way that is free to use and relatively flexible. Lately, Facebook has gone through some updates with their security and privacy controls.

To quickly explain what Facebook has up to in developing a better site, think about how you currently can set your privacy controls. Each control is in a different location, and therefore could be easy to miss. (In other words you don’t have privacy).

The new privacy update will gather the controls to one location and allow you to specifically modify whom you send status updates to as you send them. As you are changed over to the new privacy settings, Facebook will provide you with a transition tool to help out.

The transition tool notifies you of your current settings and allows you to change them before copying them over to the new privacy page.

3. The rapid growth of Facebook is comparable to the emergence of Google from a student project at Stanford to becoming the dominant search engine and largest media company in the world. Even though the utility of a search engine is perhaps more evident than that of a social-media platform, the power of collaboration and the strength of social networking are such that the potential of Facebook should not be underestimated.

Facebook is a disruptive force, in that it changes our ability to use and understand the internet in interactive ways that only a small minority have used before now. There are still many questions to whether this type of communications power, now in the hands of so many regular people, will emerge as a complete new way to utilize and employ the internet in our business, communication and social needs.