{"id":1084,"date":"2017-03-30T03:00:37","date_gmt":"2017-03-30T03:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/?p=1084"},"modified":"2017-03-30T03:00:37","modified_gmt":"2017-03-30T03:00:37","slug":"facebook-notification-wish-jane-a-happy-deathday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/2017\/03\/30\/facebook-notification-wish-jane-a-happy-deathday\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook notification: Wish Jane a Happy Deathday!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hachem Sadikki, a Ph.D. candidate in statistics at University of Massachusetts, predicted that <\/span>the year the number of dead people on Facebook outnumbers the living<\/span><\/a> is the surprisingly-close 2098. I could hypothetically be around to see that (assuming I still care about social media at that point – I\u2019ll be 103). There are some understandable assumptions Sadikki had to make: he assumed that everyone who dies is memorialized, that Facebook\u2019s 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 <\/span>xkcd<\/span><\/a> fame) who <\/span>estimated that this outnumbering<\/span><\/a> will occur in the 2060s (assuming Facebook\u2019s growth plateau\u2019s, like Sadikki) or in the 2130s (assuming Facebook continues to grow). <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>
Sadikki\u2019s results<\/a>. Note the astonishing explosion of growth in active users from 2005-2016 and the intriguing slight plateau in number of deceased users around 2014-2016 (comments about reasons why are welcome!)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

These numbers are intriguing but with the recent \u201cdeath\u201d of Vine, I wonder which will die first: \u00a0Facebook 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 <\/span>explores Facebook\u2019s future<\/span><\/a> 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\u2019ve 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\u2019s wall for their \u201cdeath day\u201d, comment and reminisce on pictures and videos, perhaps even chat with family members of the deceased. The idea probably won\u2019t catch on, but it\u2019s an amusing future to envision. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019ll be 103). There are some understandable … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Facebook notification: Wish Jane a Happy Deathday!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[101,142],"class_list":["post-1084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-a","tag-facebook","tag-memorialize"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/124"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1084"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1089,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1084\/revisions\/1089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}