The move is on…
Robin Blandford has mostly lost interest in Facebook. Pat Phelan has left. And James Corbett closed down his account a long time ago (scroll to comments).
So what you might say? Well, i’ll hand you over to the man himself Clay Shirky from here on in. Here’s an excerpt from his (and I’ll never tire of saying this) absolutely-must-read classic-of-classics “A group is it own worst enemy”
You are at a party, and you get bored. You say “This isn’t doing it for me anymore. I’d rather be someplace else. I’d rather be home asleep. The people I wanted to talk to aren’t here.” Whatever. The party fails to meet some threshold of interest. And then a really remarkable thing happens: You don’t leave. You make a decision “I don’t like this.” If you were in a bookstore and you said “I’m done,” you’d walk out. If you were in a coffee shop and said “This is boring,” you’d walk out.
You’re sitting at a party, you decide “I don’t like this; I don’t want to be here.” And then you don’t leave. That kind of social stickiness is what Bion is talking about.
And then, another really remarkable thing happens. Twenty minutes later, one person stands up and gets their coat, and what happens? Suddenly everyone is getting their coats on, all at the same time. Which means that everyone had decided that the party was not for them, and no one had done anything about it, until finally this triggering event let the air out of the group, and everyone kind of felt okay about leaving.
This effect is so steady it’s sometimes called the paradox of groups. It’s obvious that there are no groups without members. But what’s less obvious is that there are no members without a group. Because what would you be a member of?
The question now is how long until there is no life left at the Facebook party but that virtually represented by a bunch killer zombies and blood-sucking vampires.