In Toastmasters this evening, a very interesting theory was postulated in one of the speeches: Facebook has lost it's finesse for those long-term, bleeding edge adopters.
Those who were once permitted Facebook use because they had the use of a .edu email address in bygone years may have grown weary of Facebook and its uses. Those who once posted their class schedules and their one measly photo, now may have lost interest in the social media platform that has become so ubiquitous, so popular, so prevalent, so . . . bourgeois.
True enough that Facebook has no exclusivity any longer. Where one once had to be a student or a professor at an educational institution--which insinuates that you were intelligent and computer savvy in the days when computer savvy was still rare--Facebook is now a veritable mall of social networking. Anyone, from age 13 up, is "permitted" to have a Facebook account. Anyone. The quiet nerd. The outgoing socialite. The popular and unpopular alike. The rich and the poor and everyone in between. (I have it on good authority that the most visited website at our public library is Facebook.)
This theory is definitely one that has given me pause. I still find value in Facebook. Heck, my family seems to only know how to communicate through Facebook (but hey, it works . . .). And it still can share the richness of life: because of Facebook's immediacy and users seeming lack of inhibition in posting (even me - because we forget about the extra 250 people we friended, thinking only of maybe even 10), we get genuine, raw emotion. We get videos of our far away friends doing . . . whatever they may be doing. We get photos of their significant life events, the ones they're so excited about that they want *almost* everyone to know about.
Perhaps for those original Facebookers, something is lost. IMHO, I think that loss has been a great boon to everyone else, however.
Tell me: what do you think? Has Facebook lost its finesse for you?
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