Zuckerberg's "Second Law" And My Vision For Social Media

Nick Carr takes offense to Mark Zuckerberg's "second law of social media" which Saul Hansell describes as:

“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before”

Nick ends his short post with the following point:

I'm troubled, though, by the implications of this exponential growth in our release of intimate data. I mean, aren't we all pretty much tapped out already? Think forward a few years, and imagine the kind of details we're all going to have to disgorge just to satisfy the demands of Zuckerberg's Second Law. Shall no fart pass without a tweet?

I think Nick is missing two key points. First, I read Mark's comment as talking about all of us, not just what Nick or I share. So it's not that I'll double my output next year (although I do think I've been doubling each year for the past five years), it's that all of us together will share twice as much info next year as we in the aggregate have shared this year.

The second point is that sharing is not limited to blogging and twittering. It includes posting photos to Flickr, like the 82 photos that Obama's photographer David Katz posted the other day. It includes videos we upload to YouTube, music we post to Tumblr, quotes we like that we reblog, sharing our travel plans on dopplr, uploading our transactions to wesabe, posting our stock trades to covestor, and many other forms of social sharing that are too numerous to outline here.

We are just at the start of the social media revolution and this is not about twittering farts. To suggest that is trivialize an important societal change that we are undergoing. As I've said before, my vision for social media is really simple:

every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet

I think it's going to happen and Zuckerberg's law is in line with my thinking about how we are going to get there.