Time.news – What is Facebook ultimately used for? “It’s for the old ones”an 11-year-old boy candidly responded to an internal company survey, according to documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal and then collected by the New York Times which analyzed them.
Response? From those same documents it emerged that in the United States Facebook has been losing young users for years. In conclusion, in the face of TikTok’s oversaturated and frenetic image, the fury of Twitter and the almost self-parodic aesthetic of Instagram, But Facebook continues to be a relaxed place to talk to friends.
The usual bar, observed El Paìs, who also notes: Facebook “turned out to be a great party where you can see each other and be seen, where you can start conversations and share common tastes”.
Facebook, therefore, “has managed to become a giant, so much so that it has become the gateway to the Internet: a digital cover letter, the place where the media should be read and redirect traffic to its websites. The gateway to the world. Nothing less”.
In short, “Facebook’s architecture hasn’t changed in two decades”, says Geert Lovink, a researcher at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, so “the idea was, and in a sense still is, that of a supposedly free social network for friends and where others are invited to join your wall , such as newspapers, companies, advertisers and other recommended subjects “.
For El Paìs, therefore, the platform “it is a kind of personal album and diary of life that you do not want to stop having “, for a mature age group you do not want to leave,” a quiet place where its faithful are very loyal “and its very” nature as a ‘table’ creates debates that are probably impossible in other more vote for the speed and image that have come to influence literary works ”.
So a medium on which “people still talk, argue and change their minds”. A place where a generation of “old people”, as the eleven-year-old boy says candidly, has formed and cannot break away. However a generation of old.
And, as El Paìs points out, “in the face of the noise of Twitter, the dances of TikTok and the aestheticism of Instagram, the network created by Mark Zuckerberg 18 years ago remains the resistance of a few who want to chat with friends, time and calm. “. And that’s that.
A slow medium in the era of fast social communication. Like an old linotype in the digital age. But that has had its day.