We use Google to locate the capital of Ecuador. We use it to find recipes for leftover meatloaf. We use it to learn how to tie a Windsor knot, get a list of pharmacies in a 20-mile radius open past 9 p.m. and settle arguments over the exact unfolding of the legendary 1972 AFC Divisional Championship game’s Immaculate Reception.
Google literally has the answer to every and any question, which could explain why the site has been the most-visited on all the Internet since Sept. 15, 2007. That’s 30 months or 911 days or 1,311,840 seconds (cue Rent music) as being the word or phrase most commonly typed between the “www.” and “.com” in America’s Internet browsers. But on March 13, a new king was crowned—Facebook.
For the week preceding that date, Facebook was visited more than Google, garnering 7.07 percent of all Web traffic to the search giant’s 7.03 percent. Only four-hundredths of a percentage point, but when you consider the total Web traffic for this country eclipses the hundreds of millions each week, that’s still a lot of eyes.
What does that say about what people are looking to get from the Internet? That instead of learning the history of the Civil War, we need to confirm our invite to Becky’s 22nd Birthday Bar Hop, and instead of reading headlines from around the world, we have the funniest comment to leave on one of Jake’s pictures from last weekend’s loft party.
Maybe those juxtapositions are a little dramatic, but even more telling is this: Since the same week last year, Google’s Web traffic has grown 9 percent. Facebook’s? It’s up 185 percent. Call it numerical evidence of our increasing stalker-like culture, call it a sign that we care more about other people’s lives than our own, call it making way too much fuss out a statistic; it’s a dramatic shift, and the steep slope of that line indicates the growth probably isn’t over.
Facebook boasts 400 million users worldwide with approximates 70 percent outside the U.S., so roughly 120 million Americans have accounts. Compare that to Google, which has no barriers to entry other than a functioning keyboard. I showed this to a friend who works in SEO and asked him what the deal was. After the initial shock wore off, he responded with, “I honestly don’t know.”
I don’t have the answer either, partially because nobody really does and partially because I don’t use Facebook. That’s not to say I don’t have a Facebook account—it’s going strong with 452 friends and some exceptionally embarrassing photos of me dressed like one of Santa’s elves—but I go to my orthodontist more often than I check my wall or poke someone I haven’t spoken to in six months. I used Facebook when I started college, which was right around when the site was born. It was restricted to users with a .edu e-mail address and had one real purpose—to keep in touch with classmates who would be spending the next four years somewhere else.
The Facebook of today is far removed from that. It’s still being used to keep in touch with people, but there is very little meaningful interaction taking place. It has one-third the user base Google has, which means its members are, on average, visiting more than three times as often. And those visits are by and large massive, unproductive wastes of time. The initial idea of Facebook creating connectedness across distance no longer exists. Sending a friend a message with the subject line “lol” and body text consisting of “haha” is not the sort of conversation that fosters relationships. Instead, Facebook is creating a desire to know anything and everything a person is doing, but really know absolutely nothing about them.
Yes, all this assumes our country uses Google solely for benevolent purposes, and I’d be a fool to ignore things like porn and instructions on how to role a blunt being a mouse click away. But the difference is that Google has useful information, while there is not a single piece of real, substantial knowledge on Facebook. The days of overhearing conversation starting with, “I found the most interesting thing on Google…” are coming to an end; being replaced with “OMG, guess what I just read on FB!!”
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If Facebook is a gateway drug to our gradual need for less knowledge and more status updates, then Twitter is a hit of acid laced with LSD and ecstasy mainlined straight to the vein. “But Brad, you have a Twitter!” Well I…um…yeah, I got nothin’.