Editor's letter: Facebook and the digital future

last updated 8 January 2015

At a barbecue last weekend, I was talking to two intelligent guys in their early 20s when they said something that nearly made me drop my beer. “I quit Facebook,” one of them said. “Deactivated my account.” The other nodded. “I did, too.” What? Why? It was “a time waster,” they explained. Too intrusive. They were tired of getting automatically generated birthday messages and pointless status updates from dozens of pseudo-friends. Twitter and some sharing apps were cooler and more useful, they said, and unmediated contact with real friends was more rewarding. The next day, I ran across Steve Coll’s “Dear Mark” letter in NewYorker.com (see Best Columns: The U.S.). Now, “Facebookistan” isn’t going to collapse like some Mideast autocracy because three of its 900 million users opted out. But GM has pulled its ads off the site, and its stock offering has fallen flat on its face. What happens if lots of cool people decide that Facebook isn’t so cool anymore? Or safe?

I freely admit a surge of schadenfreude here. The newspaper and magazine industries are withering because of all the eyeballs and ads claimed by the Web (see Talking points). To survive, the wise men cry, you must embrace the digital future! Perhaps. But as Ross Douthat points out this week in a New York Times column headlined, “The Facebook Illusion,” Web companies like Amazon and Apple are booming because they sell real stuff. Most “content” companies are struggling online, because their customers pay them nothing, and generally ignore the ads. Even Facebook is having trouble monetizing its 900 million users. What does that mean for sites with, say, 895 million fewer? Maybe giving away your product for free isn’t the future, after all.