Today is Facebook’s tenth birthday.
What does it mean in our world?
In one decade, Facebook has become the largest media entity in history, touching a billion people.
It has transformed the way we love and fight … and how we discover new people to love and fight.
Facebook is beautiful and inspiring. It is aggravating and narcissistic. Either way, it is your own doing.
It has elevated the cat to an art form.
For many, It is re-defining our social sphere as we find goodness in some we mistrusted and ugliness in some we admired.
Facebook has altered the course of nations. It has been weaponized by bullies and those who seek to destroy our most fragile friends. A third of all divorce filings contain the word “Facebook.”
For some, it is the most beloved company in the world, for some the most feared. I can argue either side.
Facebook is like a dragon on a skateboard, scorching competitors with its fiery and furious breath. A decade in the making, it is already a Fortune 500 titan, bigger than companies that have been sweating hard for a century or more.
Facebook is an amplifier of our shiny best selves, hyped reflections of the people we want to be. Which is a kind of authenticity, I suppose.
A three-sentence status update from a stranger brought a tear to my eye. It ignited compassion and led to a deep new friendship. There is something profound about that.
Facebook delivers daily kernels of joy. Except in an election year.
It allows us to be the star and producer of our own reality show. Facebook deeply understands the value of that.
Facebook determines our daily relational reality with mathematical formulas. Addictive human connection dictated by algorithms. Hotel Zuckerberg. You can check in but you can never leave.
Facebook generally works. And that is an insanely brilliant achievement.
The future?
To be successful, Facebook must continuously diminish the value of personal privacy while increasing the amount of time people spend with ads they despise. That is not an easy business plan.
And yet.
Our unquenchable thirst to connect existed long before Facebook. To millions of people, Facebook IS the Internet. It is a family for those whose world might be otherwise vast and dark.
Facebook is the collective breath of human hope, desire, spontaneous combustion, naked poetry, neurosis, birth, death, unimaginable grief, and explosive joy.
It is the EKG for the world’s pulse.
That means something.
