Paperback: Facebook is all information all the time. Each month, more or less 20 billion pieces of content are posted there by members - including Web links, news stories, photos, etc. It is by far the largest photo-sharing site on the Internet, for instance, with more or less 3 billion photos added each month. Not to mention the innumerable trivial announcements, weight pronouncements, political provocations, birthday greetings, flirtations, invitations, insults, wisecracks, bad jokes, deep and profound thoughts, and of course, pokes.
Why should Facebook turn out to be a uniquely effective tool for political organizing? How did founder Zuckerberg's decisions at crucial moments in the company's history increase its impact? And in what ways do its unprecedented qualities help explain the rapidity with which Facebook has become a routine part of the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world? As the rest of the book will explore, many of the answers lie in a set of phenomena the author calls the Facebook Effect.
As a fundamentally new form of communication since its inception at Harvard University in 2004, Facebook (the company's original name was Thefacebook) leads to fundamentally new interpersonal and social effects. The Facebook Effect happens when the service puts people in touch with each other, often unexpectedly, about a common experience, interest, problem, or cause. This can happen at a small or large scale - from a group of two or three friends or a family, to millions. Facebook's software makes information viral. Ideas on Facebook have the ability to rush through groups and make many people aware of something almost simultaneously, spreading from one person to another and on to many with unique ease - like a virus, or meme. You can send messages to other people even if you are not explicitly trying to.
Popular though it may be, Facebook was never intended as a substitute for face-to-face communication. Though many people do not use it this way, it has always been explicitly conceived and engineered by Zuckerberg and colleagues as a tool to enhance your relationships with the people you know in the flesh - your real-world friends, acquaintances, classmates or co-workers.
The social changes that will be brought about by the Facebook Effect will not all be positive. What does it mean that we are increasingly living our lives in public? Are we turning into a nation - and a world - of exhibitionists? Many see Facebook as merely a celebration of the minutiae of our lives. Such people view it as a platform for narcissism rather than a tool for communication. Others ask how it might affect an individual's ability to grow and change if their actions and even their thoughts are constantly scrutinized by their friends. Could it lead to greater conformity?
Are young people who spend their days on Facebook losing their ability to recognize and experience change and excitement in the real world? Are we relying too heavily on our friends for information? Does Facebook merely contribute to information overload? And more importantly, could we thus become less informed?
What does being a "friend" on Facebook really mean? The average Facebook user has about 130. Can you really have 500 friends, as many do? What about 5 000 Facebook's maximum?
Nonetheless, Facebook is bringing the world together. It has become an overarching common cultural experience for people worldwide, especially young people. Despite its modest beginnings as the college project of a nineteen-year-old, it has become a technological powerhouse with unprecedented influence across modern life, both private and public. Its membership spans generations, geographies, languages and class. It may in fact be the fastest-growing company of any type in history.
It changes how people communicate and interact, how marketers sell products, how governments reach out to citizens, even how companies operate. It is altering the character of political activism, and in some countries it is starting to affect the processes of democracy itself. It is no longer just a plaything for college students.
Unlike just about any other website or technology business, Facebook is profoundly, centrally, about people. It is a platform for people to get more out of their lives. It is a new form of communication, just as was instant messaging, email, the telephone, and the telegraph. During the early days of the World Wide Web, people sometimes said that everyone would eventually have their own home page. Now it is happening, but as part of a social network.
However, this scale, rate of growth, and social penetration raise complicated social, political, regulatory and policy questions. How will Facebook alter users' real-world interactions? How will repressive governments respond to this new form of citizen empowerment? Should a service this large be regulated? How do we feel about an entirely new form of communication used by hundreds of millions of people that is completely controlled by one company? Are we risking our freedom by entrusting so much information about our identity to one commercial entity? Tensions around these questions will grow if Facebook keeps extending its influence across more and more of the globe as it is doing now.
The Facebook Effect (2010) aims to explore these questions. It tells the real inside story of CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his company, and its social implications, but you can only understand how Facebook became such an amazing company and where it might go if you understand how it all got started in a dormitory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the brainchild of a restless and irreverent computer science major student.
The Facebook Effect was shortlisted for the Financial Times and the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2010.
About the author: Founder, host, and CEO of Techonomy, David Kirkpatrick is a journalist, commentator about technology, and author of the New York Times bestselling book The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World published in 32 countries. He spent 25 years at Fortune, and founded and hosted its Brainstorm and Brainstorm Tech conferences. In addition to writing for Techonomy, he contributes to Forbes and Vanity Fair. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
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