"Those of us with considerable real-world experience are often at an advantage relative to young people, who are comparative novices in the way the world works. The mistakes novices make come from a lack of experience. They overestimate mere fads, seeing revolution everywhere, and they make this kind of mistake a thousand times before they learn better. But in times of revolution the experienced among us make the opposite mistake. When real once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, we are at risk of regarding it as a fad." - Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody
In other words, I agree with Jeff.
Some other stats to help you make the case that social media is no fad:
- The combined traffic on social networking sites is more than the combined traffic on porn sites (that's JUST SocNet sites, not social media sites) among 18-24 year-olds according to a 2007 article in Time Magazine.
- The number of Google searches for "Facebook" overtook the number of searches for "porn" in early 2008.
- YouTube hosts 100 million videos and is the #3 most trafficked site on the web. Ten hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
- Wikipedia has 2.5 million entries in the English language alone.
- Facebook is the #5 most trafficked site in the U.S. and more than eight out of 10 college students have an account.
3 comments:
The world isn't becoming addicted to porn as some have been afraid it would.
But are they becoming addicted to social networking instead?
I agree, it's not a fad anymore than telephones, cell phones, or the internet are fads. Social media is simply a new way to communicate--an evolution of the technologies listed above. What I think will happen is that it will continue to change and develop. Maybe it will seem like a fad because newer technology for social media will come along and replace the older technology, but people are the heart of it all, not technology, and it’s still going to be social media at its core.
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