No, Facebook is Not an Infectious Disease: "“The future suggests that Facebook will undergo a rapid decline in the coming years, losing 80% of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017." That’s according to a pair of Princeton University researchers who liken Facebook adoption to an infection. Those who don’t join the social media platform are immunized, they say; those who leave Facebook are experiencing recovery.
If it sounds like junk science, it isn’t. Though I do think the researchers, despite their best efforts to use virus spread models to analyze the growth, adoption and decline of social networks, got pretty much everything wrong.
The study, which is still in draft form and has just been submitted to a peer review journal, came out of Princeton Universities Dept. of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. It aims to use epidemiology, the study of how infections spread, to predict and explain the growth and decline of online social networks.
Let’s put aside the infection analogy for a moment, and judge the study on its merits. The scientists started with a major social network: MySpace. Wait, what?"
'via Blog this'
StarBuzzOnline.com
No comments :
Post a Comment
Your comments are welcome.