When Facebook connects 500million people in a huge digital society – personal context is the key for meaningful digital relations.
Facebook has reached its 500 million user and, has thus turned into a huge global digital social state. For the digital literate it has become an infrastructure commodity, almost as much as electricity, gas, water or as Google for search. Facebook is a window to a personalized tribal fire that gathers around it the relevant friends of an interacting individual for sharing moments, ideas, experiences, plans.
But what about me? How can I, the individual Facebook user, feel comfortable on this huge platform and still maintain the intimacy, selective privacy and trust within our social spheres that reside in this huge digital society?
Facebook defines itself as a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The turbine that runs this infrastructure is a swarm of personal digital connections, conversations and exchange of informations and experiences. In such intricate cobwebs of personalized social spheres, its inherent increasing return cycle will bring about its exponential future growth with exponential privacy, control of personal data, trust and scope of personal interactions related issues and apprehensions, and on the other hand, will make it harder to leave, as it increasingly becomes a commodity magnet.
Does the huge expansion of Facebook mean that I can have more friends on my social graph? Will that be any criterion to my popularity, value or place? The Dunbar number of 150 as representative of the upper limit number of social relationships that we can manage on an individual level, is also much too high when it comes to meaningful digital sharing within ones social sphere.
The most burning questions is not FaceBook’s dominance in the social networks markets – it’s the place of the individual in such an omnivoring social commodity.
The individual personal prism is the differentiating factor that sorts out the noise, creates a relevance hierarchy of importance, significance and degree of ties. That is true for both sides – me, the user, who wants to share with relevant people around relevant interactions, as well as providers and advertisers who want to target relevant customers for their offerings and not just shoot into the crowd.
Every personalized Facebook page becomes a personal pillar of individualism, shared through the eyes of the beholder with her Facebook friends. This individualized personal prism creates singular pages in a huge global yellow pages like digital address book.
Ideally, entrance, sharing and participation in these personalized windows to the digital lives of the owners’ pages are restricted to the friends and friends of friends of that individual.
In reality, flocks of hungry advertisers lurk under these windows, plotting how to enter these personalized circles and harness the private social spheres. Their aim is to turn those trusting friends under the auspices of the individual camp fire, to their advocates, ambassadors and evangelists to their offerings, be it through willing participation or piggybacking by turning social sphere lists into social graphs in social marketing mixes.
From my point of view, I, the user, want to be in control of what I share with whom, how and by what degree of connectedness. It is subjective, individual, dynamic, and transcends the boundaries of Facebook as a connectivity platform.
My context in Facebook, is a beacon that should shine for my entourage, and only if I choose to, be made available, under my explicit consent, to be shared as part of a commercial CRM effort.
Yet my Facebook context is not separated from my overall context as I surf the web, search, converse, communicate, read and interact.
Restricting context to my Facebook interactions, even if they are part of a huge global social infrastructure, does not reflect my whole context as a person. I call a world that will have a personalized contextual prism – Contextivity.
Contextivity is about MY Context all through, across platforms, providers and predefined issues. Contextivity turns imprisoned, fragmented personalization into a harmonized experience that meshes my context with connectivity. It makes my digital choices and interactions natural, intuitive, gives it my personal colors.
Facebook’s platform is perfectly situated to become a central junction that combines connectivity to context and become the infrastructure for digital relations, based on selective context lens, relevant to a specific exchange, a true personal experience.
However, once such holistic contextification services are developed, that very combination makes it all the more acute that all context based activities remain user side, in her control and not be owned or manipulated by any single provider, especially as big and fundamental in the utility like service it provides, like Facebook .
