Facebook Livemap: visualizing globalization through user-generated TV

Facebook keeps on packaging user-generated content to offer new product and create new potential advertising spaces. This time the news is called Facebook Livemap. No big announcements before revealing a collection of user-generated live broadcasts from all over the world. The fact that it is endless and unpredictable makes it addictive.

This format is something different than on-demand TV (think of Netflix), a concept that caused a lot of suffer to specialised traditional channels, not to mention the old generic traditional channels.

Traditional channels might get a space over there, maybe in the future they can also have the option to pay in order to gain prominent visibility, but they will always face competition of a potential army constituted by more than a billion users that can broadcast whatever they feel (or need), anytime, (almost) anywhere. Advertising is not interrupting the show, but is just “sustaining” it, or in the future it might be just the show. A different model, much less invasive and able to target users with unprecedented precision in the television industry.

Users can choose what and when the big brother can watch, but there is always a small brother hidden inside algorithms that knows what’s in the shadow, often more relevant for marketing than what’s publicly shown.

Geography is the channel and content is random. There could be a leak from a Bilderberg meeting, a pre-recorded footage, a real-time suicide, sex, cheating, violence, a baby that is just born, one who is dying, a natural disaster, a revolution, in involution, the biggest lie ever that will cause a revolution or just bullshit, most of the time – useful material for contemporary anthropologists. What’s the next show?