At the Web 2.0 conference last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, pronounced “I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.” His proclamation, now called “Zuckerberg’s Law,” seems linked to Moore’s Law (it’s unclear if that was intentional), which states that every 18-24 months the number of transistors capable of fitting on an integrated circuit doubles. It’s a thought-provoking statement.
So why do we share online? The innate desire to connect, to feel part of something larger, the promise of being discovered, the possibility of immortality in the digital realm as a hedge against our own mortality? Everyone has different reasons. Certainly for the younger internet users, the question isn’t why, it’s why not. This is the post-reactionary generation; the internet users that don’t dwell on the division between online and offline worlds. They see the internet as part of one fluid online-offline existence. Who hasn’t heard of a shocked parent chastising a teenager for posting intimate online information? Younger internet users simply have a higher threshold for acceptable exposure. Plus, when it comes to freedom, logging on to the internet has become the modern day equivalent of getting the keys the the car. As teenagers, don’t we all want to see how fast the car can go?
If we can possibly fulfill Zuckerberg’s prophecy, it will be the younger users that drive the trend, and the savvy entrepreneurs that make it happen. This entails not only enabling the sharing of new types of information seemlessly (real-time video, heart-rate, genome, gps location, etc..), but finding new ways to make it captivating and navigable once it’s uploaded (this is where avatars with AI technology can really start to make things interesting).
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