I learned it on Instagram today: The Chive has officially left Facebook.
Ok, well they haven’t fully left. But they will no longer be posting their articles, videos and other content directly to their Facebook page. Instead, they will be sharing links only in Facebook, and the links will take people back to their webpage. The way God Herself intended.
Have we reached peak Facebook?
A recent article in the Guardian reports that while people over 55 are still flocking to the social network in droves, a key demographic: teens and young adults, are leaving Facebook or even failing to join in the first place. Teens and young adults, according to the Guardian, are “defecting to snapchat”, and while Facebook initially managed to hang on to this group by buying up Instagram, it hasn’t been able to buy snapchat, and copying the popular features of snapchat on Instagram and the Facebook platform have not served to engage younger users.
Continue reading “Chasing Meaningful Interaction: Facebook’s Declining Value”
You wake up in the morning, and what’s the first thing you do? If you’re like most people, you roll over and check your phone. When you look, you see that cheerful little dot on your social media, messaging, and email app icons – 10 new emails, 4 new social media comments, 3 new text messages. For a moment you feel popular, and maybe a little stressed out and compelled to respond. So, before even getting out of bed, you’ve answered some emails, sent back a few emoji’s via text, and looked at your Facebook and Instagram comments, and those little red notification dots are cleared from your apps. You breathe a sigh of relief, and feel the stress reside… for a while… until it starts all over again, with your phone vibrating, interrupting your train of thought or whatever you’re doing with a red notification dot on your various apps. The notification dot is feeling less and less cheerful and more and more like a burden every time it lights up on your phone, and you feel your stress mounting as you are compelled to deal with the interruption. Then you deal with it and feel relief again… until the cycle continues.
Civil society is defined by the London School of Economics as:
“Civil Society refers to the arena of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes and values. In theory, its institutional forms are distinct from those of the state, family, and market, though in practice, the boundaries between state, civil society, family and market are often complex, blurred and negotiated. Civil society commonly embraces a diversity of spaces, actors and institutional forms, varying in their degree of formality, autonomy and power. Civil societies are often populated by organizations such as registered charities, development non-governmental organizations, community groups, women’s organizations, faith-based organizations, professional associations, trade unions, self-help groups, social movements, business associations, coalitions and advocacy groups”
I’d like to put the emphasis on “uncoerced collective action” in that definition, because I’d like to talk about how civil society might be challenged or at least threatened in an era where we organize using digital communication technologies.