On Facebook, community and connections

A few longer reads that have appeared lately, proving that everyone loves to moan and groan about progress:

• The Flight from Conversation (New York Times)
On technology and the fear of interacting with other people. Personally, I think it’s a little overblown and too much of the blame is put on technology when there’s been so much other societal change (probably mainly rampant urbanization) going on. And the evidence shows that strong social media users have more and stronger offline ties, too.

• Facebook: Like? (Intelligent Life)
What is Facebook, and where is it going?

• Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? (The Atlantic)
Like the first story, I think this is much ado about nothing – there have always been lonely and out-of-place people, but now they have more outlets for communication, not less. Correlation and causation aren’t the same thing.

The future of media consumption (and why you can’t trust averages)

The general patterns of our research support what people are seeing and saying about, for example, the rise of social media, the rise of mobile, and that people are using voice less. But certain groups are using it a lot less — and that phrase, ‘the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed,’ applies. If you look closely at the youth segment, they are already quite different than the rest of us.

– Researcher Ewan Duncan speaks to MediaPost on the digital divide

A visual guide to Facebook Timeline

You may have noticed that on Friday, all Facebook brand/business pages were forced into the new page layout, with new features. This infographic is a good overview of what the changes mean.