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Facebook’s IPO not just a business story, of course

February 1, 2012 By Anne Leave a Comment

With its clever lede – “It sure pays to have friends” – the New York Times reported a story that goes way beyond business, even though it is indeed a big business story: “Facebook, the vast online social network, took its first step toward becoming a publicly traded company on Wednesday as it filed to sell shares on the stock market.” The Times adds that Facebook is “on track to be the largest Internet initial public offering – trumping Google’s in 2004 or Netscape’s nearly a decade before that.”

But some other numbers point to the bigger social story, the one in which Facebook’s IPO is just one part (I’ll get to the numbers in a minute). Other parts include last year’s Arab Spring (including what’s happening in Syria right now) and what happened with the Stop Online Privacy Act in this country, week before last. It’s the story of our radically changed global media environment – the one that’s shrinking our world (by enabling us to participate in as well as watch developments far from us, as they happen in real time) and slowly, over time, redistributing power, with more and more citizen journalists and producers, joined by citizen lobbyists a couple of weeks ago, and probably soon citizen regulators (see this). The instant mass communication and distribution enabled by tools like Facebook and mobile phones is the enabling part of the story. And Facebook’s non-dollar – people – numbers provide evidence: 843 million users worldwide, 483 million of them accessing the site each day, uploading 250 million photos a day. Each month, users collectively add 30 billion pieces of content (comments, photos, videos, etc.) to the site. And those don’t represent content as we’ve always known it. It’s the content of our lives. It’s the moment-by-moment collective self-expression of a growing proportion of humanity. As a whole, that content is like a living thing. It’s certainly constantly moving and changing. All of which adds up to something with which the entities or forces of control in the world can’t really know how to contend. As part of the generation that straddles what media used to be (mass media) and what it is now (social media), I will always have a certain sense of amazement at all of this. Anyway, so this is a history lesson, a media story, a story of social change, an education story, a technology story … I guess just a human story.

More people numbers in Facebook’s S1 document:

  • Growth in the past year: A 39% increase of monthly active Facebook users (MAUs) to 608 million between Dec. 31, 2010 and the same day of ’11. As for daily active users, the increase was 48% (to 327 million) over the same period.
  • Mobile use: Last December, Facebook had more than 425 million MAUs using mobile products (such as the iPhone and Android Facebook apps).
  • An everyday thing: 360 million Facebook users were active “at least six out of the last seven days,” Facebook reports.
  • FB friends: 101 billion friend connections by this past New Year’s Eve
  • A whole lot of “likes”: FB users posted 2.7 billion likes and comments a day during the last quarter of 2011.

Related links

  • CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statement in Facebook’s S1 filing tying the site’s constant changes to “The Hacker Way” in my ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid’s article on the IPO at Forbes.com – hmm, the tao of hacking?
  • A link to and more info on Facebook’s S1 in what amounts to a sidebar to Larry’s article
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Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: Facebook IPO, media shift, Social Media

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2016 TEDx Talk on
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IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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