Facebook has taken off in the United Kingdom. It has all happened very quickly.  London has the most members of any city in the world at 1.3 million and rising. It had only 175,000 in January. The UK, with around a quarter of the population of the US, is the third largest nation on Facebook and the largest outside North America. It seems that British Facebook members spent around an average of half an hour a day on the site in August.

What is particularly interesting is that it has moved into the metropolitan political and media elite. My own Friends List has three MPs from two parties (although I know I am only dealing personally with two of them) and a slew of middling political journalists and activists. To some extent, this is a fashion phenomenon - a 2007 equivalent of the hula hoop or the Rubik's Cube - but the product has touched a nerve. As with our recent investigation into Second Life, our interest is not in the claims made for the platform by publicists or the hysterical reactions of the increasingly tedious commentariat but what actual participation teaches us about its potential for social and political change.

The first thing to be said about Facebook is that it cannot be understood except in terms of play, of sheer fun. Any claims that it can change the world as it is now should be taken with a pinch of salt. Of course, social networking tools will effect major changes, and we deal with that below, but most people are on the site for self-expression and ludic performance. 

Political groups tend to be poorly maintained. Political discussion is largely absent except in short bursts that can tend to be rants rather than considered opinion. Political activity tends to fall into just three basic categories - the emotional expression of pain or desire in some campaign designed to 'raise consciousness', the provision of basic information about 'real world' meetings and events and the opportunity to create a 'group' amongst like-minded people.  Business effects seem to be similar. 

The platform is really a network of small families each ranging from 10-120 people (beyond which the idea of Friends is meaningless) so that an idea has to be good enough to jump virally from 'family' to 'family' if it is to reach mass communications status. This means that traditional sales messages that contain no intrinsic interest soon fall by the wayside and that emotionalism and jokeyness triumphs over sweet reason. Good comedy writers are going to be worth their weight in gold when viral marketing becomes the norm rather than a marketing sideline.

The qualities of self-expression and play that dominate Facebook are its strength but also represent the weakness of the platform. The 'family' is not a real world network at all. My (real) immediate family is typical in each member having a Facebook account but not permitting any other member of it to be a Friend.  I have only three (out of 67) business contacts and this is also typical because a ludic approach to life does not currently work very well when you are trying to present an image of reliability and professionalism.  

You could choose to make Facebook a real family tool (my wife does this, but excludes immediate family) or a business tool, but you would probably then want to remove such groups as People Who Don't Sleep Enough Because They Stay Up Late for No Reason (which has 199,408 members). You would almost certainly not get to be a vampire or a zombie or have an acquarium or listen to Metallica ... so why bother. Linked-In may be as dull as dishwater but you won't get caught in the office looking foolish as you try to find the right alien for your online planet.

Facebook provides you with a half-baked parallel identity. Instant decision-making that in a MMORPG game might have you winning a magical battle-axe or being wiped out by a blood-sucking demon could result in you looking on Faceboook like a high school nerd rather than the intellectual that you think you are. You choose Friends (or have them thrust upon you, accepted in a weak moment), write a Profile, join Groups and use Applications that can define you very quickly.  But, while this is not the 'real' you, because a lot of the choices are free choices that you cannot have in the real world, it may be more the real inner you than the real social you outside. Your Facebook identity becomes a volatile hybrid entity existing somewhere between the really real person and the fantastically real you - which is perhaps what you like to think you would be if you had Blofeld's wealth and 007's looks and charisma. Or have I lost you at this point!?

This makes it an appallingly difficult tool to manage in a business or political context.   It is anarchic in its effects unless you are prepared to dedicate many working hours to constructing your identity to order. Frankly, why bother because, as we have found, its social utility in the real world is fairly limited. The best strategy is generally just to go with the flow and have fun.

Take political campaigning. Over 400,000 people signed up to a group supporting the Saffron Monks in Burma. Did it make any difference to the actual structures of power in Rangoon? No. It was the emotional gut reaction of lots of sweet, naive, feeling people - the international relations equivalent of the 'Diana effect'. But you don't change the world through expressions of emotion, only through hard work and organisation directed at the acquisition of the levers of power. Such emotion expressed by clicking a mouse may even be positively dangerous in dealing with complex real world issues.  The latest posting on the Burma group expresses the deep despair of nice people faced with hard reality: "whats been happening is so unjust... lets just hope and pray it all gets sorted out." Yes, well, precisely.

In fact, some single issue campaigns that can get significant numbers of Facebook people within a national territory to sign up to a very specific and focused Group can make the platform work in effecting change. The Group Offer Asylum to Iraqis Working for the British Armed Forces is typical in being part of an integrated campaign that is forcing some semblance of morality on to an a-moral government but this Group is only a small part of a wider whole, involving lobbying, events, media relations, blogs and collateral.

We set up an experimental local political group and we learnt the following. A Facebook group is useful for centralising information amongst a pre-existing group of activists but it requires constant maintenance, is difficult to market within Facebook and is impossible to use outside Facebook. An activist group that treats Facebook as a tool for information exchange still has to direct activists into Facebook to make use of it and it cannot use it to reach people outside the platform. 

There is a massive contradiction between the needs of serious political education to reach as many people as possible and organise them and Facebook's privacy rules. These rules restrict actual organisation to the very few and then de-link mass propaganda and information from the organisational process. Most political and media Facebook Groups, set up in a fit of enthusiasm, are soon neglected by their creators and the 'members' drift away - the numbers of groups that just sit there uselessly is increasing by the day and, once an account holder notices they are clogging up their own group lists, they get removed. Once these removals start, the process starts to continue remorselessly as others fail to see the point in being part of something for 'losers'. 

What does seem to be working are the cultural interest groups.Some of the liveliest groups on my list seem to be in the faith sector - not only Christian but esoteric.  Even here, the same rules apply - the creator of the Group has to engage with an audience that must to a great extent have pre-existed in the real world.

For business, Facebook is a challenge on many grounds. This playground offers a number of threats - identity theft (although this has been much exaggerated and can be dealt with through implementing a very few simple precautions), leak of confidential material, negative commentary, time-wasting and defamation.  For us to say that it is largely a playground will encourage an instinct to ban it in the work-place if only because most business and professional people are terrified of 'smelling the roses on the way' in case it undermines their anxious and inherited work ethic. Maybe some arty-farty ad agency can encourage playfulness but not a law firm.

In fact, this may be a mistake. Facebook is expressing something very real in the public's desire to be playful. To expect the work-place in a modern services economy to operate along dour Reithian lines is to ask for trouble later in terms of human resources. Younger people actually work very hard but they also play hard. They increasingly blur the edges of their lives so that where love, work, family, life and culture were once separate spheres, they are now becoming one fluid process of multiple identity where anything goes so long as the job is done, the children are happy and everyone eats regularly. It is not necessarily a happy world. It is an anxious world - and play (as with small children) is what you do to exorcise fear as well as learn.

More to the point, social networking operations (like Second Life) may be primarily a game but Facebook is the path-finder to a much broader revolution in communications and social organisation that will be far more functional in purpose. Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and other similar brands will survive as mass tools but the future of organisations almost certainly lies in the adaptation of these technologies to more focused ends. 

Emotional campaigning and tiny activist groups may mean that Facebook's actual influence on policy is limited but, eventually, social networking tools will be adapted to political organisation. Our view remains that existing political organisations may eventually be swept aside by bottom-up operations that remove the decadent intellectual class and the commentariat much as the arrival of printing removed the priestly caste - but these effects will take decades to unfold, will undoubtedly see a fight-back [no doubt as a claimed Re-Enlightenment] and may not be as automatically 'liberal' on both sides of the game as the advocates of change may assume. 

Business, too, can and will use social networking tools as means of unlocking the intellectual potential within organisations (at least in the services sector) in ways that may be threatening to upper level managers and professionals (though not to the highest levels of all). The essence of social networking is that the primary user has to inspire others to engage in the network and that the operation will die naturally when it ceases to have a function. Secure small social networks of committed persons cutting across the usual boundaries within a corporation and set specific tasks will transform management responses to the market. The controlled anarchy of such systems will require new thinking that will need new unconventional management theories.

Still, these changes are not going to happen over night. Those who leap into bed with social networking tools too rapidly are going to get very burnt. Fortunately, the very nature of the tool permits small-scale experimentation and conditions where a thousand flowers may bloom. A sort of survival of the fittest will privilege flexible and creative minds over command-and-control. The creative destruction of capitalism will continue regardless.

One final lesson of our adventures in the crazy world of Facebook is that these new technologies are very content heavy. Just because intellectuals as a class are on their way out, does not mean that intellectual skills will not be at a premium. You could say that everyone (holding down a serious job) will have to learn to become an intellectual and to have a reasoned opinion. Thirty years ago, I would not have been taught philosophy at high school because it was useless - such studies were reserved for those such as me at Oxbridge so that I could rule a non-existent empire wisely. Now, my son studies the difference between Plato and Aristotle in the first year of his sixth form. The numbers being trained to think are growing and will offer a standing threat to a complacent elite.

Intellectual effort is required not so much to set up the technology as to know what you want from the technology and how you can make technology work for you - IT people are no longer grunts and despised geeks, they are partners and facilitators for your vision. The actual cost of delivery (as technology) is going to be miniscule compared to the cost of content maintenance, group facilitation, evaluation and then ensuring that knowledge exchange becomes effected as action.  Under a worst case scenario, there will be lots of playful happy bunnies running around with bright ideas and no system to evaluate the costs, make the changes happen and keep the system running by offering intelligent feed-back. This is not going to happen because the market will not let it happen. Welcome to the new world of co-operative ludic capitalism ... have fun!

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