Foursquare, the geolocation networking service, grew 3400% in 2010 and reached 10 million users by June 2011. In 2010 Facebook leapt from 337 million to 585 million users, with 7.9 new ones registered every second. It’s a requirement-”everybody,” “always,” “every industry,” “all those experiences,” “never have to be alone.” The vision doesn’t just provide social contact as an option in your daily affairs. You’ll be working and living inside a network of people, and you’ll never have to be alone again.” And not just industries, but individuals, too … And no matter where you go … we want to make it so that all those experiences can be social.” And when Time Magazine named Zuckerberg its Person of the Year, it summarized the goal of his company this way: “Facebook wants to populate the wilderness, tame the howling mob and turn the lonely, antisocial world of random chance into a friendly world, a serendipitous world. Here is how Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga, the social network game developer, put it last year: “In five years, everybody will always be connected to each other, instead of the web.” Zuckerberg repeated the point: “If you look five years out … every industry is going to be rethought in a social way. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare and all the other social media services coming and going are about changing, fundamentally and forever, the very nature of human experience. Today, with the spread of social media, the pain of separation is over, and so is the exclusivity of love.Īs Facebook gets ready to go public and huge dollar amounts are discussed – a $100 billion valuation, $5 billion in hoped-for sales, $100 per share, $1 billion in profits in 2011 – CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others have a very specific vision of the future.

When you were apart, solitude hurt, but it made the time together all the more precious. The medium of love – the letter, the quiet walks, the rose, the kiss – remained between you and your interest, and you didn’t reproduce it for others. Except for a close friend or two, you kept it secret until you were established as an “item,” and even then you maintained the border between private exchange and social identity as a couple. Hours of contact with the loved one alternated with days alone with your longing. Communication, not to mention courtship, seemed to take a long time. The last thing you wanted was for someone else to read it, at least not until the beloved saw it and said, “Yes.”īack in the old days, love wasn’t social, it was private. You talked about dreams and disappointments and school and love, and sometimes you culled it for phrases in the love letter you agonized over for a week before leaving it in the mailbox or locker of your interest. Remember the pre-Web personal diary? It had a lock on it, and after writing your thoughts about the day, it stayed tucked in a drawer.

The digital divide by mark bauerlein