Facebook- A big nothing

[Occulus]

22. Oh, Facebook is nothing at all like the industrial revolution or the information age.

That's blindingly obvious.

[div class="excerpt" style="border-left: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-top: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-right: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-radius: 0.3077em 0.3077em 0em 0em; box-shadow: 2px 2px 6px #bfbfbf;"]But I quote:[div class="excerpt" style="border-left: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-bottom: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-right: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-radius: 0em 0em 0.3077em 0.3077em; background-color: #f4f4f4; box-shadow: 2px 2px 6px #bfbfbf;"]Facebook really does nothing long lasting in the sense of changing economics. It is an advertising gimmick.

Couldn't the same be said of "The Price is Right", or is that art? Or both?

Does an internet 'thing'- Like Facebook or YouTube- have to change the economic game, or not splash its users with ads and marketing schemes, in order to have 'value'?

I'm as critical of Facebook about many of its policies as the next user (I do not like the Timeline), but really. I don't pay for using it, so questions of economic value really do not make a whole lot of sense to me.

I will, however, go far enough to with your own line of thinking to say that Facebook will have nothing like the social ka-blam of the invention of the light bulb or the telephone, nor will it have the social impact of the invention of sound recording or even the recipe for beer. That's just silly.

But valueless? Facebook isn't that, either.

As for the next "great movement" (the joke writes itself), nanotechnology and a workable mind-machine interface spring to mind, but those are whole other threads each.