Decoding the new economy

Privacy’s still beating heart and the social media challenge

The changing habits of younger web surfers are challenging the assumptions underlying social media services.

“I’m not a very public person,” twenty-two year old Walter Woodman tells the New Yorker in How A Relationship Dies on Facebook.

One of the assumptions of the social media industry is that digital natives, those born after 1990, have little if any expectations of privacy. The New Yorker story challenges that idea.

Much of the New Yorker’s background is taken from the Pew Centre’s May 2013 report Teens, Social Media and Privacy which interviewed 802 US teens and their parents to identify young adults’ attitudes towards privacy.

As the Pew Centre’s Mary Madden wrote in a follow up post to that report, US teenagers aren’t about to about to abandon Facebook yet but they are concerned about privacy and the work involved in managing an online persona.

While some of our teen focus group participants reported positive feelings about their use of Facebook, many spoke negatively about an increasing adult presence, the high stakes of managing self-presentation on the site, the burden of negative social interactions (“drama”), or feeling overwhelmed by friends who share too much.

This suggests a far more mature, and complex, understanding of privacy by teenagers than many of the social media boosters assumed when declaring that privacy is irrelevant in the Facebook era.

Like their parents, teenagers and young adults know there are consequences for sharing too much online which challenges the social media platforms that have built their businesses around users spilling everything about themselves into the big data pot.

It turns out digital natives are just as conscious of the risks as their parents, although how they handle it may manifest in different ways, and the assumptions of many social media businesses aren’t quite as robust as they appeared not so long ago.

Facebook’s struggle to stay relevant

Are Facebook’s advertising policies alienating users and leaving advertisers unimpressed?

Are we getting sick of Facebook? Tech magazine CNet stirred up the interwebs on the weekend with the claim that Teenagers are Tiring of Facebook a meme was pushed by the New York Times’ Nick Bilton dissecting his experience with the service.

It’s not just teenagers moving away from social media sites though, many adults are getting sick of intrusive adverts and promoted posts getting in the way of the news about family and friends.

As an example, here are the ads taken off the page of one fifty year old woman’s feed.

“I find these offensive” she says, “I’ve been posting my results from a fitness program and now my Facebook page is plastered with ugly weight loss advertisements.”

Clearly the targeted advertisements are working too well and clumsy marketers are destroying the user experience with ugly and offensive ads.

Not that those ads are working as Nick Bilton found when he decided to promote a post to his 400,000 followers.

From the four columns I shared in January, I have averaged 30 likes and two shares a post. Some attract as few as 11 likes. Photo interaction has plummeted, too. A year ago, pictures would receive thousands of likes each; now, they average 100. I checked the feeds of other tech bloggers, including MG Siegler of TechCrunch and reporters from The New York Times, and the same drop has occurred.

When he decided to advertise, his engagement went up by ten times. Leading Nick to conclude that Facebook were suppressing his unpaid posts while pushing the one’s he pays to promote.

Even for advertisers, a few hundred likes doesn’t translate into much of a return.

That suppression of useful posts is one of the reasons teenagers are moving, one 17 year old I asked about why he’s moved from Facebook said the ads cluttered up his feed.

Which leads us to the reason why people use Facebook – they use it to talk to friends and relatives; not to watch ads.

It took commercial radio and television a decade to figure out the right mix of advertisements and contents, a balance that is still tested today. Social media sites are going to have to get that mix right soon.

Facebook has the most at stake and their time is running out.

Digital hunter gathering

Digital hunter gatherers are another mis-reading of history and the economy. We should be careful about these labels.

It has come to this – we’ve had the digital natives, the digital immigrants and now we have the digital hunter-gatherers.

This is the logical end of the ‘sharing economy’ philosophy which sees retweets, mentions and Facebook likes a hard asset.

Unfortunately having 100,000 Facebook friends giving the thumbs up to your latest retweet of an article of dubious value doesn’t translate into income – most of the digital curators find themselves living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Life as a hunter gatherer is not pretty or easy – it’s short and brutal. The only certainty as a hunter gatherer is if you don’t find something to eat today, you will starve tomorrow.

In some ways, it’s fair to say the modern social media expert is not dissimilar to the prehistoric hunter gatherers in that their days are numbered and starvation is a near certainty.

One conceit of modern times is that life was so much better in the pre-industrial era; that before the industrial revolution people worked less and primitive man lived a noble life unshackled by possessions.

That’s all nonsense. Mankind shifted to an agricultural and then an industrial society because life is a lot better than fighting sabre toothed tigers for buffalo or trying to live on berries.

Myths like this are part of masking the steady decline in middle and working class incomes. George Freedman, the CEO of the Stratfor security consultancy, discussed this in his blog post The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power.

The rise of the precariat, workers employed on a casual or project based basis, is part of that erosion of incomes. As Freedman says, the “the decline of traditional corporations and the creation of corporate agility that places individual workers at a massive disadvantage”.

In this respect, today’s digital hunter gatherers are more like the day labourers of a hundred years ago where workers, like my great-grandfathers, would wait at the gates of the factories or docks hoping to be picked for the day’s work.

One of the truths of today’s workforce is that it’s a harder place than a generation ago and the expectation of naturally rising incomes is gone for the bulk of the population.

This means we have to re-imagine our own roles in a changed economy. The assumptions of the post-war economy which have sustained us for over fifty years no longer hold.

Hunter gathering hopefully won’t be option which we end up with.

Reproductions at the Museo del Mamut, Barcelona 2011 from quinet on Flickr

Similar posts:

Similar posts:

Similar posts: