Facebook is a high voltage network with frequent and embarrassing short circuits. The latest concerns the decision to maintain Trump's incendiary posts. A decision that so seriously embarrassed some of its major advertisers — such as Unilever, Coca Cola, Ford, Microsoft Pfizer, Starbucks — that it provoked an unprecedented embargo in the history of the advertising industry.
And Facebook is certainly not the only social network to have gone into short circuit. To explain how social media ended up killing communication there is now a book that has just come out (Guerini Next e goWare for online) which bears precisely that title, How social media killed communication. Because, as the two authors Guido Bosticco, Giovanni Battista Magnoli Bocchi and the various contributors make clear, if it is true that the market now lives on social media, it is equally true that communication, desperately seeking virality, has gone haywire on social media.
CLAY-FOOT GIANTS
The giants of the web can influence world opinion and the public conversation itself more than the institutions themselves, but their model rests on fragile foundations. They are giants with feet of clay. The mass public that keeps them going has become, beyond a reasonable doubt, ungovernable, unmanageable and intemperate.
There is still no way to remedy this state of affairs. We don't know if social networks themselves have to do it or if it should be the force of the law to restore order. Or if a turning point could arise, as the authors of this beautiful book suggest, at the very source of communication. That is, from the choices of companies, organizations and institutions that with their campaigns forage the business model of social media which is based on advertising. Perhaps the boycott of Facebook is a first sign that something is really happening in this direction.
If the flow of resources towards social networks decreases, if attention to the context rises in the awareness of advertisers, if the ethical aspect begins to become a component of the advertising business, it could happen that the frequency of communication short-circuits on social networks be drastically reduced.
DRAGONS OR CHICKS?
After all, social networks are not those dragons that sometimes appear, but start-ups that are affected by market dynamics, public tastes and the moods of investors and paying customers.
In the excerpt from the book, How social media killed communication, that we propose below, Guido Mariani reviews some of the most striking missteps and sinkings of aarmada of social media that seemed unsinkable. To say there is hope.
Enjoy the reading!
A SPACE OF NEGATIVITY
Facebook, like all colossal businesses, is too imposing and mammoth to be able to afford a conscience. This is why the dream of a global and progressive community sometimes turns, and fortunately not always, into a no man's land populated by hidden puppeteers who act with political ends, sowers of hatred and prophets of conspiracy theories and fake news.
Despite being spaces populated by millions of individuals, social networks risk becoming, according to that metaphor used too much by Americans, a echochamber, an echo chamber in which the same voices resound and multiply and whoever screams the most wins. In this space, negativity, indignation, resentment resonate more and better.
In this whirling mechanism that never stops, actuality has been replaced by virality, the ability of information to spread at epidemic speed.
Stories are consumed in cycles, in surges as overwhelming as they are rapid that bring a topic to the surface and then leave it. Viral information and the news cycle thus become the engine of the public debate of the moment and are capable of shaping politics, culture and society.
SOCIAL AND EPIDEMIC
The proof of this nefarious mechanism occurred during the epidemic, unfortunately not virtual, of the Coronavirus which shocked the world and blocked the global economy. The people relegated to the most colossal quarantine in the history of humanity, thanks to social networks have been able to stay in touch, dialogue, create unity in the distance.
But on a communicative level, in one of the most tragic eras since the Second World War, social networks were the tool with which the seriousness of the contagion was first diminished and then an attempt was made to bury it all with an irony that over time of time it has appeared more and more out of place. Eventually they became the vehicle by which unfeasible strategies, imaginary therapies, miracle cures spread.
In the field of corporate communication there are countless cases of companies that invest millions in image and promotion that have incurred sensational and painful slip-ups for their reputation and balance sheets.
THE WICKS OF THE OLD ECONOMY
In 2018, a well-established German household appliance company celebrated March 8 with an image of a group of smiling women surrounding a washing machine and dryer and a slogan that read as follows: "May women always remember to represent what they makes it unique". A message more worthy of a 60s carousel than a campaign for the web age. Obviously it was not received with enthusiasm by the public.
A short time later Lookheed Martin thought well on the occasion of "World Photo Day" to invite the public to post a photo of their products on social media. The company, one of the largest multinational arms manufacturers, was inundated with photos of weapons, including a fragment of one of the bombs they produced that had gutted a school in Yemen. But injuries often also happen to those who have always juggled well in the social galaxy.
…AND THOSE A LITTLE BETTER
It happened in 2017 to the beauty brand Dove, part of the multinational Unilever, which after years of launching extremely successful and popular online campaigns with the slogan “Real Beauty” ran into a spectacular and costly communication debacle with a three-second Facebook ad.
A hygiene product juxtaposed images in sequence that did not have to be related to each other, but which merged with each other and gave the clear impression that a black woman was transformed or worse "cleaned up", thanks to the product, in a white woman. Years of successful promotional campaigns were pulverized in a few days for a video that lasted less than a breath.
CULTURAL SLIPPERS
The stylists Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana know something about it. Their brand's 2018 social media campaign featured a ditzy Chinese woman trying to awkwardly eat Italian foods with chopsticks. The intention was, perhaps, to create an amusing sketch that juxtaposed Italian stereotypes with oriental ones.
Whatever the objective, what counted was the reaction of the public, which, especially in China, was furious. In a country where the worst thing that can happen to a person is to lose face, the clumsy and humiliated girl who faced pizza with two sticks was seen as a bad-taste mockery of an entire population.
The fashion house suffered a significant drop in sales in China, a country that now accounts for a third of the entire luxury goods business.
THE FLOPS OF THE NEW ECONOMY
But if the market now lives on social media, are social media stronger than the market itself? Are the big names on the net omnipotent or can they too suffer fatal crises? Although the giants of the web today seem immortal, the young history of the web and social media offers numerous cases of brilliant startups with exceptional prospects that remained an illusion and successful parables that turned into costly and catastrophic flops.
MYSPACE
In the summer of 15 years ago in Beverly Hills MySpace was founded by two young entrepreneurs Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe. It allowed the sharing of photos, posts, music. It redefined the standards of social networks. Two years after its birth it was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation for 580 million dollars. It looked like the deal of the year, if not the century.
Choosing music as the main attraction, in June 2006 it became the most visited website in the United States, beating even Google. In 2007, it was valued at $12 billion. In an era before smartphones, it exceeded 100 million monthly users. In 2008, it had revenues of $800 million.
A few months later it was already water under the bridge. Facebook, with new features and more functional and attractive graphics, surpassed it in number of users and the public abandoned it en masse.
MySpace became overnight like an embarrassing piece of clothing of an old-fashioned fashion. In full hemorrhage of users and burdened by losses, the site was put up for sale at the final price in 2011 for 35 million. After countless attempts to relaunch myspace.com is still active, but it looks like an archaeological find.
FRIENDSTER
Unlike MySpace, the Friendster social network no longer exists today. It closed its doors in 2015 after a triumphant start and a long and inexorable decline.
Born in 2002, two years before Facebook for which it was undoubtedly a source of inspiration, it was the first web community to allow you to create personal profiles that allowed you to share content with your contacts.
In 2003, a few months after its birth, Google attempted the purchase by offering 30 million dollars, but the offer was declined. The numbers suggested a business destined to grow exponentially.
And it was like that for some time. Between 2008 and 2009 he managed to attract more than 100 million subscribers, becoming a popular pier also in Asia. Then some technical problems took over, a restyling of the site was decided and users fled en masse, reabsorbed above all by Zuckerberg's platform.
SECOND LIFE
In the years in which the web universe discovered sharing, the first social game, Second Life, also made its mark. Not just a video game, but a real virtual community built on alternative identities.
The idea of web alter egos building a second life was so fascinating that the start-up became one of the most sought-after in the hi-tech world, also obtaining funding from Jeff Bezos.
In 2006 it had millions of users and there was talk of creating a virtual economy that was born from the alternative universe of the platform. But the fun didn't last long. The players left as quickly as they arrived. Second Life has become a piece of modern art that survives for a number of niche users.
ORKUT extension
Google has always wanted to become a protagonist also in the world of social networks. After attempting to buy Friendster in 2004, he launched his own social network called Orkut, named after its developer Orkut Buyukkokten, a German of Turkish origin who landed at Stanford and was recruited by the Mountain View company.
Buyukkokten was the pioneer of the path that Mark Zuckerberg took a short time later: he began to design a social network within his university, then became a developer engineer, he expanded it to make it open to everyone. Google fully embraced the project.
The idea took up many of the specifications of Friendster and also thanks to the patronage of the search engine, it managed to reach around 300 users in a short time. The network was consolidated especially in India and Brazil.
However, competition from Facebook became unsustainable.
GOOGLE+
In the Silicon Valley headquarters it was decided to bet everything on Google+ and YouTube and in 2014 the inevitable closure was decided.
Even this choice was not entirely spot on: if YouTube has become the main global platform for sharing video content, Google+ had an initial moment of affirmation and then became a now superfluous integration of the Gmail email account. On April 2, 2019 it was closed to the public.
NONE
In 2005 one of the fathers of the web as we know it, Marc Andreessen, the inventor of the Netscape browser when nobody knew what browsers were, jumped into the world of social networks with Ning. But even King Midas of the net missed his mark for once. Ning allowed users to create personalized social networks, small communities around a topic. A beautiful idea that everyone believed was bound to take off and that garnered hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital funding. Ning was valued in 2009 at more than $700 million. But the boom never happened, the idea remained beautiful on paper and practiced by few.
PING
Apple is also among the members of this club of defunct social networks. The visionary genius of Steve Jobs was not immune to missteps. In 2010 he launched Ping, presenting it to the world as the social network that created “the meeting of iTunes with Facebook and Twitter”.
It was a network of connections that started from the Apple iTunes application and that made it possible to create contacts, listen to and share music, report musical events. In many respects it was similar in some specifications to Spotify's current structure. It never caught on. Without users and without particular attractions, the service disappeared in 2012.
WINE
The Vine phenomenon also had a short life, a service that gave the possibility of making short videos designed to be shared in a community. Founded in 2012, it was bought almost immediately by Twitter, being launched as an app in January 2013.
It instantly became the most used and most downloaded video sharing application on mobile phones, reaching 200 million users. But the platform was unable to adapt to the whirlwind changes in the industry. The inability to create profits for the principals wines alienated many infant celebrities and alienated sponsors.
The competition from Instagram was the final blow. In 2016, Twitter announced that the application was shutting down.
EONS, DELICIOUS, DIASPORA
But among the social media with a bright future behind them there are also Eons, Delicious, Diaspora.
Eons, born in 2006, a club reserved exclusively for users over 40 which managed to reach 800 users and then disappeared in 2012.
Delicious, a service of social bookmarking designed to share web content, bought by Yahoo in 2005 and soon sank after a series of innovations gone wrong.
Diaspora, the "decentralized" response to Facebook, a social network designed to ensure maximum autonomy and privacy for users born in 2010, but without ever reaching a significant critical mass.
TUMBLR
The Tumblr case, on the other hand, represents an example of how toxic content can represent entrepreneurial success, but risk leading to failure.
The platform launched in 2007 combined Twitter, blogs and social networks. Over the years it has grown in popularity and users reaching up to 500 million visitors. In 2013 it was acquired by Yahoo! Inc. for $1,1 billion.
The tormented story of Yahoo!, a former web giant, didn't help and Tumblr started to lose its luster, appeal, money and sponsors. But the real story on the head was the discovery that a considerable percentage of traffic and use (about 30%) was related to pornography.
In December 2018, the already declining platform decided to ban this content, perhaps improving its reputation, but in fact alienating the most active part of its audience.
Tumblr thus continued an inevitable decline and was sold off in August 2019 by Verizon (already a buyer of Yahoo!) for a figure according to journalistic sources of less than 3 million dollars.
THE NATURE OF SOCIAL MEDIA
In the case of Tumblr, a noble choice, albeit a late one, was punished since, beyond proclamations and declarations, social networks are startups that in the most fortunate cases have managed to transform themselves into truly international corporations and respond first of all to the market and investors.
In their essence they are and remain products, services and tools. Giants with feet of clay capable of influencing global public opinion, but vulnerable to the fashions and tastes of such a large audience as to be indistinguishable by now.
The individual retains the right to choose whether and how to use them to his own taste and benefit. Unless he prefers to participate without choosing. By himself becoming a product and a tool.
