Using Facebook

Submitted by administrator on Thu, 02/12/2010 - 14:46
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I often wonder how different society would be without the craze of social networking. With over five hundred million members, Facebook has now become a compulsory part of society. It is mandatory to own a Facebook account if you are a University student, most of whom log in to Facebook every day to check for notifications that may have cropped up since their last log in twenty minutes earlier.

It is apparently the norm for the said category of users to broadcast their lives on Facebook through constant status updates, ridiculous numbers of pointless photos, and expressing their 'individual' taste in music and films with the option of 'becoming a fan'/'liking'. Facebook has a firm grip on society that some users are not even aware of.

With Facebook mobile providing the option to use facebook on the go, it has become acceptable to update your status whilst socialising, with users informing others that they are currently in the cinema or the pub with their friends. To me, this is utterly humiliating and suggests that their company is so dire that they have to turn to a website without any substance.

It is quite obvious why Facebook is society's current obsession; it is a form of social advertising, to boast about where one has travelled or how many times a week they go out drinking. For those without the highest self-esteem or lacking in social skills, it provides the option to create a different persona and the impression of having an active social life, when in reality, most of their free time is spent worrying about how they are perceived through the Facebook medium, thus desperately making amendments to it.

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Submitted by timdavies on Wed, 12/01/2011 - 14:21.

The challenge with coming to

The challenge with coming to a view on social network sites is that people use them in many different ways.

Often people are not so much 'broadcasting' information - as sharing information to an 'imagined audience'. That is, when someone updates their Facebook status at the cinema, they may end up sharing the information that they are there with 250 people, but the message was really meant for one or two particular people - perhaps to send out a positive message ('hey, come join us!') or perhaps as a move in an ongoing conversation ('Now I've watched this film too that we were talking about'). There are messages you might not direct /at/ a particular person, but which you would like them to be aware of. As a result people are 'hiding in plain sight' as danah boyd puts it: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/08/23/social-steganograph...

There are, of course, many things to be challenged about the role Facebook has and the way it works. Users need better critical skills to make sense of it; and the platform needs to be kept in check. But perhaps we do that best when we look really in depth at how people use the sites, what meaning they have for them, and then at thinking about how this is positive and negative...