Conclusion

“First I used ICQ, then went to MSN and then to Google Talk, mainly following the migration of my contacts.” (Adriana, 21)

“What makes me use a system (or not) is, without a doubt, the presence of my contacts and, also, how frequently they use it. I say this because it’s easy to see the decline of the MSN Messenger compared to the (not as good) Facebook chat.” (Marcos, 20)

These statements from two Computing students from the beginning of the 2010s reveal that many began communicating through instant messenger with ICQ, then migrated to the MSN Messenger and then to Facebook’s messenger service. This migratory movement from the part of users among systems that implement the instant messenger indicates the change of the market leader throughout the years, which in its turn reveals the competition among systems that implement that conversation medium, as we discussed on Chapter 5 on Ecosystem.

In these statements it also becomes evident that one person’s decision about which system to adopt is greatly influenced by the choice of their social group, with that being the social selection mechanism that leads to the success or failure of systems, as discussed on Chapter 4 on Selection.

The statements show the culture of use of instant messenger systems until the year 2012. If this research had been made in 2015, these students would also have talked about the migration to WhatsApp’s mobile instant messenger service, which became the leader in this market. This reveals that, as we discussed on Chapter 3 on Evolution, new systems that threaten the position of market leaders are constantly being released, and that innovations in the functionalities of these new systems attract the attention of early adopters, who in their turn attract other users. Innovations in systems can allow new conversation characteristics, leading to the evolution of the medium; eventually, they contribute to the development of a new conversation medium, that needs time and maturity to be recognized as such. Due mainly to the popularization of Facebook and WhatsApp, we recognized the development of the most recent internet conversation medium, group messages, as told on Chapter 6 on History.

It’s important to note that these statements are about systems used throughout the years for conversations established specifically through instant messages. It’s important for us to organize analyses per conversation medium, because evolution is a result of the competition that occurs among systems that implement the same one. Therefore, the identification of which are the internet conversation media, as presented on Chapter 2 on Taxonomy, is the necessary basis for us to elaborate and endorse the evolutionary perspective presented in this book.

These statements were made by Computing students. This profile was chosen because these are intensive users. Since they live this culture intensively, their statements clearly reveal the competition among the systems (or the migration, in the anthropocentric perspective). However, this culture is not restricted to young students who chose computing as a profession; cyberculture is the contemporary culture of us all, as we discussed on Chapter 1 on CMC.

Observe that we are using an evolutionary perspective to discuss the statements presented here. We believe that this perspective, this form of analyzing computing conversation systems and some of the contemporary cyberculture phenomena, is the main contribution of this book. In this conclusion, we summarize this and other contributions we hope to have given to the theoretical framework we presented and endorsed here.

Perspective for (re)interpretation

The theory of evolution applied to internet conversation media, just like any theory, supplies constructs that change the way we understand a certain domain, help us (re)interpret phenomena and makes us question certain statements. In the Introduction (and in more detail throughout the chapters) we showed that this perspective makes us see a few conceptual errors that we have become used to hearing on the media, such as that there is a father of the email (which reflects a creationist view) or that social network systems will bring about the end of the email (while the truth is that they don’t even compete among themselves; systems and conversation media are different concepts!).

We’ll use the evolutionary perspective to discuss another case that was widely notified by the media in the beginning of 2014. Researchers published an article in which they applied a mathematical model that describes the progression of epidemics to predict the decline in the number of Facebook users (Cannarella and Spechler, 2014). The authors used the premise that the adoption and abandonment of social network systems like MySpace and Facebook follow the same pattern of contamination and recovery of people infected in a population. That research predicted that Facebook would lose 80% of users between 2015 and 2017. At first, we thought that the idea of Facebook as a contagious disease of which users would soon become cured was funny. But later we saw that it wasn’t a joke, but a research made by two PhD students from Princeton University. It’s true that by the end of 2015 the interest in the word Facebook fell by 50% if compared to the peak reached in the end of 2012, as recorded by Google Trends. It’s important to note that companies don’t reveal if there’s a decrease in the number of their users, so it’s hard even to verify if Facebook is actually losing users or if people are simply no longer researching the word “Facebook” (since Google Trends doesn’t measure the number of users of a system, but the occurrence of key-words in its search mechanism).

<figura da queda de interesse do facebook>

Our point of view differs from that of those researchers. It’s based on system competition for users in a market. According to what we discussed in this book, in order for Facebook to lose its position of leadership, it would be necessary for another system to compete for and win its users (or, in the anthropocentric perspective, for these users to migrate to another system). It’s important to stress, however, that big companies such as Facebook buy competitors that threaten their supremacy – such as WhatsApp and Instagram – even though a few of them resist, such as Twitter, which has refused countless offers. It’s also important to stress other strategies, such as forcing users to install the Facebook Messenger app in order to exchange instant messages by smartphones and tablets, competing with WhatsApp, which belongs to the company itself. Or supplying internet access in the poorest regions of the world with the intent of increasing user numbers. Yes, Facebook will be surpassed by a competitor sometime, but the decline in its user numbers, according to our theoretical perspective, can’t be understood through the dynamics of the progression of an epidemic, but through the competition among systems for the same market.

Other contributions

We hope this book will also contribute to several specific fields, such as cyberculture, linguistics, system development and design, social media and the history of technology.

• To researchers and students of cyberculture, we showed how cultural changes affect and are affected by the evolution of computing conversation media and systems.
• To linguists and scholars of the textual genres that emerge in cyberculture, we differentiated textual genres from conversation media and discussed how different media influence the discourse.
• To conversation services developers and designers, we showed how the influences of previous systems can be found in new systems. We called attention to the fact that there needs to be, in UML, a new diagram to express the functionalities of other systems that are being considered in the new system being designed. Another implication of the concepts presented in this book is the possibility of designing innovative systems by exploring conversation characteristics that aren’t present in existing media, such as, for example, designing asynchronous services that are based on audio and video (until publication time, all asynchronous media are based on text);
• To journalists that write about social media, an evolutionary perspective helps review facts before spreading a piece of news. We hope this perspective will help avoid certain mistakes, such as some that have been widely publicized.
• To professionals that make market researches about conversation systems, we provided metrics and laws about this market, which will help the development of more accurate researches. With these metrics and laws, we hope, for example, that in future researches systems that don’t compete in a same market (because they implement different conversation media) won’t be compared.
• To researchers and historians of the evolution of technologies, more specifically of internet conversation media, we hope that an evolutionary perspective will help tell history not through the description of facts, dates and characters, but through the influences that took place throughout time. In this book we merely began a study of the influences of functionalities in the history of each conversation medium; however, this history deserves to be told with more precision and in more detail.

Since cyberculture is the most important phenomenon of our century, it’s being studied by several researchers of several fields. We, the authors of this book, are researchers in the area of Information Systems and, because of that, our gaze turned to computing systems: we tried to explain how the systems that implement conversation media are being used or ceasing to be used in our society. The perspective we presented and defended in this book doesn’t end here; on the contrary, we hope that it will be another contribution for the better understanding of cyberculture.