The fate of social media

It's 2022, you're reading this blog through your mobile communication device which comes fully integrated with internet and you're about to update your own blog/facebook/twitter to tell everyone your entire thoughts, current location and your every planned out move for the day.  A few hundred other people are subscribed to your accounts so they know exactly where you are and what you are doing.  YouTube has turned into a streaming website where integrated cameras in mobile devices are capturing your surroundings, who you're with and this is also being uploaded to your various accounts.

No this isn't the blurb of a badly written Sci Fi book, it's my opinion of where blogging and social media will be in 10 years time.

Ben Elton wrote a book in 2007, Blind Faith, which is based around people uploading their entire lives onto the internet, live streaming through their houses in a Big Brother style and the expectation and social demands that intimate and personal events are videoed and loaded onto the internet for scrutiny by peers and accessed like a personal CV.  Privacy is considered illegal and people often look into other peoples lives as a form of entertainment.  Five years later, this idea is beginning to look like a haunting truth on the way society is leading.  

People are beginning to communicate an extraordinary amount of information over the internet, willingly.  It has been predicated that by 2015, global internet traffic will have quadrupled.  Experts are predicting that there will be exobytes (1,048,576Tb) of data being stored, accessed and transfered over the internet.

But do these figures relate to an increased number of bloggers?

Yes, it does.  But the real question is how many people will actually read it, not just open the link or glance at it.  Very very few blogs break it through to mainstream and the commitments that it takes to maintain them to a high quality often turn bloggers off the idea.  Realistically, very few people outside of your main circles of friends and occasionally friends of friends truly read a persons blog.

The internet has affected the attention span of humans.  We tend to only skim through articles and information on the web rather than reading them in their entirety.  And this is where micro blogging fills the gaps.  This way you can tell your friends and followers your every move by simply tweeting where you are, or checking into places via facebook and foursquare on portable devices.  People literally spill all their information over the internet, using small micro blogs and statuses.  And this is getting increasingly popular and easier to access.  The website XKCD released a comic portraying the popularity of online communities as of Summer 2010:

This  is a good representation of which online medias people are using to communicate information.  And this hasn't changed to much in the past 18 months.  Tools such as facebook and twitter, used to communicate short items of information outstrip those of blogs and I see no reason for this to change.  There are now 845 million users on facebook and this figure is constantly increasing.  This is by far the biggest online community on the web and I see no reason for this to change.  In the next 10 years, lives will increasingly be lead on a virtual capacity and shared with others who do so.