No Facebook, no face: the social pressure of Facebook

Even when you aren’t involved in the technical world or aren’t an expert on online social media you will know it, Facebook. It seems like every company, every person and even a pet has a Facebook account nowadays. More and more digital technologies conquer the world in a rapid speed. A lot of companies make a business out of these changes, trying to gain the biggest market share and improve the world. But what are the needs those media fulfill? Is there any need for the customer or is it just a hype substituting another media?

Social networking sites (SNS) are quickly becoming one of the most popular tools for social interaction and information exchange. Hughes concluded that personality was related to online socializing and information seeking/exchange (2012). Facebook filters the displayed information from the more than thirty billion pieces of content that is available every month. According the statistics of Facebook an average user creates ninety pieces of content every month, creating immense data storage (Vanetti, 2010). Without a Facebook account a lot of information, a lot of discussions about actual topics and information about personal events isn’t available. For example, the summaries and important questions and details for your study are posted online in the Facebook group by classmates to discuss and provide each other important information. Without Facebook, you don’t have access to these post and it is more difficult to connect and discuss with classmates. The analysis of the relationship between users’ needs and civic and political participation indicated that informational uses were more correlated to the civic and political action than to recreational uses (Park, 2009). Recreational users are often looking for content of friends and funny videos. The customer is therefore forced to use Facebook to be aware of the things that happen, on social, political and economic base.

How long will it take for everybody has one or more online account at a SNS?

Bibliography

Hughes, D. J., Rowe, M., Batey, M., & Lee, A. (2012). A tale of two sites: Twitter vs. Facebook and the personality predictors of social media usage. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(2), 561-569.

Park, N., Kee, K. F., & Valenzuela, S. (2009). Being immersed in social networking environment: Facebook groups, uses and gratifications, and social outcomes. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 12(6), 729-733.

Vanetti, M., Binaghi, E., Carminati, B., Carullo, M., & Ferrari, E. (2010, September). Content-based filtering in on-line social networks. In International Workshop on Privacy and Security Issues in Data Mining and Machine Learning (pp. 127-140). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Even when you aren’t involved in the technical world or aren’t an expert on cryptocurrency you will have heard about Bitcoins and Blockchain. Media and newspapers can’t stop talking about it, trying to explain everything to the mainstream citizen. But why is it so complex that even a technical person doesn’t understand it completely?

Many people claim that Blockchain is a revolutionary disruptive technology, that eliminates the involvement of a third party in a transaction, reducing cost, reducing delays, making it more secure and being efficient. Every change will be synchronized in real time, due to the distributed ledger network. These ledgers also called blocks are linked cryptographically. The result? A transparent and secure network (Scott, 2016). This sounds fantastic. A technology that every industry would love to implement and improves the transaction process. However, there are also people who claim that it’s not a disruptive technology, but rather a foundational technology, as it will provide the structure for future transactions involving anything of value (Casey, 2017).

Yet, aside from Bitcoin itself, there are only a few real-world implementations of Blockchain (Bloomberg, 2017). We have to keep in mind that Blockchain raised from the fast-changing industry and technology, but there could also be a chance that it’s just only a contemporary complex foundation that expands our knowledge and that the implementation is too difficult on short term, so there will be a better solution in the future. Even Kris Henley, communications manager with the Centre for the Digital Economy at the University of Surrey warns for the complexity of Blockchain. “Blockchain is thus also turning out to be more complicated than most of us thought,” (Bloomberg, 2017).

One of the additional challenge of Blockchain is the regulation aspect. The government and other important institutions regulated the transactions of modern currencies. The adaption towards a more digital and fast transaction like Bitcoin is hard to implement and challenges a lot of parties (Deloitte, 2017).

How long will it take to implement or replace the Blockchain Technology?

References:

Bloomberg, J. (2017, 5 31). Eight Reasons To Be Skeptical About Blockchain. Retrieved from Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/05/31/eight-reasons-to-be-skeptical-about-blockchain/#117dd7f95eb1

Casey, K. (2017, 4 27). Blockchain: The Pro’s and Con’s of a Technology that Will Affect our Future. Retrieved from Medium: https://medium.com/totvslabs/blockchain-the-pros-and-con-s-of-a-technology-that-will-affect-our-future-f67037da7d64

Deloitte. (2017). Blockchain technology: 9 benefits & 7 challenges. Retrieved from Deloitte: https://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/innovatie/artikelen/blockchain-technology-9-benefits-and-7-challenges.html

Scott, N. (2016, 10 7). Blockchain: the internet’s second generation. Retrieved from Director: https://www.director.co.uk/blockchain-internets-second-generation-19926-2/