Hachem Sadikki, a Ph.D. candidate in statistics at University of Massachusetts, predicted that the year the number of dead people on Facebook outnumbers the living is the surprisingly-close 2098. I could hypothetically be around to see that (assuming I still care about social media at that point – I’ll be 103). There are some understandable assumptions Sadikki had to make: he assumed that everyone who dies is memorialized, that Facebook’s exponential growth will eventually plateau, and he used the U.S. death rate (provided by the CDC) for the entire globe. But his results have been confirmed by others, such as Randall Munroe (of xkcd fame) who estimated that this outnumbering will occur in the 2060s (assuming Facebook’s growth plateau’s, like Sadikki) or in the 2130s (assuming Facebook continues to grow).
These numbers are intriguing but with the recent “death” of Vine, I wonder which will die first: Facebook or its user base? Meaning, will we reach this cross point of number of deceased users equaling the number of active users before Facebook becomes obsolete? Munroe briefly explores Facebook’s future in his post and his take-away is that either Facebook falls out of favor (generating the 2060s scenario) or it continues on its current path (the 2130s scenario). I like exploring the Facebook-falling-out-of-use scenario, envisioning a Facebook that eventually evolves into the memorial sites that we’ve chuckled at in class. What if Facebook becomes an acceptable, everyday, communal mourning site? People wake up each day get a reminder to write on someone’s wall for their “death day”, comment and reminisce on pictures and videos, perhaps even chat with family members of the deceased. The idea probably won’t catch on, but it’s an amusing future to envision.