Deadbook, the Long-term Facebook
jacquesmattheij.com
jacquesmattheij.com
"There are approximately 7 billion people in the world. The average life expectancy is somewhere around 67.5 years. So in the next 67.5 years 7 billion people will die"
He's confusing average with actual.
Here's a simple example: imagine we have two people. 1 person who will die in 1 year, and 1 person who will die in 9. The average here is 5 years, and after 5 years only 1 person will be dead, not 2.
While It's not always true that selecting only individuals who have a value less than or equal to the average gets you half the population, this correct for normally distributed value when there are lots of samples, so the authors numbers are basically off by a factor of two.... which he almost notices here:
"So in the next 67.5 years 7 billion people will die. 67.5 years * 365 days is about 25,000 days. That’s about 280,000 deaths per day average. Right now that number is lower at about 155,000, but as the population ages that will catch up with us."
</rant>
But: zero of these 100 people live more than 103 years (if we started with 1000 only 3 would live to be 103 years old):
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
That means that everybody who is already living now will die in the next 103 years.
If at the moment 7 billion people live on earth practically all will die in the next 103 years. That their individual life expectancy is 80 years doesn't change the fact that practically nobody (that is, to the error of 0.5%) survives his 103rd year.
I started with the US data. If we'd adjust it for the world, we'd see that even for life expectancy of 67 less than for example 10% of those living now will survive their 80th birthday or something like that. So the rougher approximation is that you have to increase the "67 years" some years more but anyway in 100 years practically everybody living now is dead. Yes he was not technically right with using the life expectancy of a single person to give the exact year, but the "cutoff" year is still not much farther away. And how old are people now actually matters to know how many will die in which period.
We're the first generation to document our lives so thoroughly, history before the digital age will fade away, much like oral history (before written history) has for us.
... but we don't know yet if all the data that we create will still be around in a few generations, and it's far from obvious to me. It seems unlikely to me that the platforms we use today will still be around at this time, and my guess is that there won't be a sufficient incentive to migrate legacy data from one platform to the other (remember Geocities?). Managing the digital memories of the living is a profitable business, but managing that of the dead might not be.
It's possible, but the alternate hypothesis is that Facebook now has a sufficient number of users that network effects will keep those users locked in, provided that the company itself doesn't do anything ridiculously stupid.
Which will happen? I have no idea: the future is hard. But a plausible story can be spun in either direction.
Basically all Facebook users have at least one email account. Then there are all of the people who don't use Facebook, yet still use email. That's a lot of people!
Also, that's really only just considering personal email usage, too. Many of those people, whether or not they use Facebook, use email as part of their jobs.
Maybe Facebook or some other mechanism will catch up with email at some point, but that's looking very unlikely.
Email is broken for a lot of reasons. Managing your contacts, finding lost contacts, finding the email of that person you met last night, party planning, birthday reminders, attachments, sharing photos with groups of people.... There are a lot of things that are extremely difficult to do with email, but are very easy to do on Facebook. So I consider Facebook to be simply a better email client for communicating with your friends and family.
A next-generation email/facebook/social system will have to take things to the next level, and integrated with your phone, and perhaps even replace the conventional cell phone carriers completely.
Either we're living through the digital dark ages, and any and all personal records we make will be toast within 30 years, or we're going to leave a lot of information about ourselves cluttering up the datasphere. Whether it's curated by Facebook or by some other successor entity is beside the point: the question is, what is the net going to be like when more than half the people with a presence on it are dead?
Even ancient civilisations kept orders of magnitude more records than have survived now, and they even had the added bonus of being physical — with linguistics the only obstacle to future generations' reading of their content. Our mass of data that seems so permanent is wrapped up in proprietary file formats; it's stored on volatile media; and it's kept around by companies who, in the context of centuries, are flashes in the pan.
How much of the digital information you possessed even ten years ago is still readily accessible? I know in my case there's not a great deal. Now extrapolate that forward 50, 100, 150 years…
Most of it. I've been careful.
(Now if you asked about twenty years ago you'd get a different answer; I think I've lost about 75% of the email, but most of the actual written material survives. 1992 is roughly when I got serious about personal data retention.)
Added in edit: Well, I guess from the downvote(s) that people do assume the FB engineers will die before they're 80.
Added in further edit: It's been suggested that my comment lowered the tone. If that's the case then I apologize, it wasn't intended to. It's been further pointed out that from 27 years of age onwards, the male life expectancy in the USA is indeed 50 years or less. So I was wrong anyway. I've learned something, for which I am not sorry. I was wrong, for which I am not sorry, because it afforded me the opportunity to learn. I may have lowered the tone, for which I am sorry.
It won't be like standing in a graveyard. It will be like sitting at home, with you friends and family, knowing that those photo albums on the shelf are full of pictures of people you won't see again. Every once in a while you'll look through them but otherwise life will go on.
Maybe they'll call back. One day. maybe.
So what are you seeing, what browser/OS are you using, and have you tried, you know, telling him?
(Dare I guess it was written by a white affluent young male?)
It's mind moggling that you raise this point and call it "mind boggling".
What's "ming boggling" about it? People are either alive or dead, period. And for the purposes of the article, that's the only distinction that matters.
What if someone has the flu or is in hospital for 6 months, or even looses his leg or something? Does that affect his Facebook page, besides him neglecting it for a while maybe? And even if it did, what the duck does it have to do with the topic that interests the article, i.e the amassing of pages by dead users?
Yes, us awful young white males are never sick.
Really? I have the feeling that the author confuses "average life expectancy from birth" with "average life expectancy from now on". And thinks that a live expectancy of 67.5 years means that all people alive today are dead in 67.5 years. And forgets to take into account the deaths of people who are born in the future.
The average live expectancy of all living persons is much lower then 67.5 more years from now. Maybe half of that? Additionally people will have children and some of these will also die earlier then in 67.5 years. And some of the children will have children who die earlier etc.
The result could actually be right, but it would need some more explanation how it was calculated.
I don't see the point of this kind of nitpicking. It's doing nothing to further any sort of conversation on the topic -- it just seems needlessly critical.
US (and to some extent European) culture tends to have a big taboo surrounding death and the dead, and only a small part of it is to do with the USA being a very young nation that has grown rapidly in population (so that it has a much higher living:dead ratio than many other countries). In pre-computer times, our records of our dead were confined to dusty parish registers and the occasional photograph. What does it mean to live in a society where dead people all leave thousands of geotagged photographs, videos, lifelogs, blog entries, and canned rants?
The long term cultural implications are fascinating ...