The CBC’s Theresa Lalonde interviewed me back in January about social media trends for the coming year, and she was kind enough to replay one of my predictions that actually seems to be coming true (that people are going to become more attentive to how they use platforms like Facebook, and who they friend) in a piece about Quit Facebook Day.
Quit Facebook Day, judged by its stated goal, was kind of a bust, and not that surprisingly. Quitting Facebook is a pretty big step, social-media-wise; it’s the primary means of communication between a lot of people, and no other social media platform can claim to have nearly its share of people’s online attention. (That’s not even considering the difficulty of reassembling all the stuff you may have shared on Facebook over the years.) Asking folks to turn their backs on it is asking a lot… and probably too much.
So it’s no surprise that May 31 came and went without much fanfare (beyond the odd snarky tweet)… and certainly without Facebook’s sudden demise.
It foundered for the same reason a lot of participatory web sites never quite get off the ground: asking too much, too soon. I see it all too often – a potentially great community that sets the bar way too high. If you want participants to do something big (say, contributing a five-minute video or launching a blog on your site), you have to start off by asking them to do something smaller: commenting, rating or a similar low-cost activity that gets them climbing the participation ladder.
But give the organizers some credit: they worked hard, got a lot of attention and helped drive the conversation about how Facebook – and other social networks – can do more to respect their users and the information we share. (By the way, 30,000 people did take the ultimate step of deleting their accounts, according to some reports. That ain’t nothing.) No, Mark Zuckerberg probably wasn’t crying into his corn flakes this morning… but this is one moment in what I hope is a much larger awakening among the online population about the value of their participation and privacy.
And those of us who want Facebook – and other social networks – to be better, more open and more respectful aren’t just in this for May 31 or June 6. We’re in it for the long haul.
