Daniel Hunter
Professor Jacobsen
Media Literacy
October 5th 2010
Digital Nation
The social networking site Facebook, has become a major part of our lives. There are currently over 500 million people on Facebook. People all over the world, both young and old, use Facebook everyday. I think that when we join social networks like Facebook, we are extending and expanding our identities. With all of the features it has like viewing photos, posting a status, and having “friends” Facebook becomes a significant tool for expanding our identities.
Facebook is all about extending our identities for everyone to see. With Facebook, people can view information like, our genders, birthdays, relationship status, sexual orientation, religious views and other personal information that shows our identities. Our way of life is put online for the world to see. There’s also a “likes” section in Facebook where friends can see what a person likes. This can include, music artists, televisions shows, sports teams, hobbies and much more. A user’s photos show us their lifestyle. Viewing photos usually tells us how someone dresses, places they’ve been and who their friends are.
Photos and personal information aren’t the only ways Facebook expands our identities. A feature as simple as posting a status tells us a lot about someone’s identity. When someone posts their status it tells us how they feel, what they are doing and what’s on their mind. Facebook users can also share videos or photos with others through their status. Each time someone changes their status on Facebook, they show everyone a little something about themselves. Since users can see all of their friends’ statuses, they are always on top of what’s going on in their social life.
Friends are another way that Facebook expands our identity. Most Facebook users want to share their profiles with as many people as they can. Each user’s Facebook page shows who their friends are and how many friends they have. If the user has a lot of friends, it probably means that person is popular. I’ve noticed that people sometimes make judgments about others based on their number of Facebook friends. I’m sure that most people who use Facebook have people on their friends list that they don’t even speak to. I feel like Facebook encourages people to choose their friends based on popularity and social status. While Facebook helps us to share ourselves with other users, it also changes how we value friendship. A person’s quantity of Facebook friends is more important than the quality of Facebook friends. A user’s need to have lots of friends shows their desire to spread their identity to as many people as they can.
I don’t think the loss of “personal space” is the surrender of someone’s ego. People who use Facebook for popularity and status simply want to be a larger part of the online “collective organism”. I’ve noticed that people will post a status when they do something as trivial as leaving the house or walking their dog. They feel the need to put every single detail of their life for everyone to see. Certain Facebook users will even share very personal information about their love life or their family for everyone to see. Personal space doesn’t seem to bother these people, otherwise they wouldn’t have shared it with the world.
The creator of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, recently announced a new application called “Facebook Stories”. “Facebook Stories” allows users to share how Facebook has impacted their lives. Ben Saylor is a 17-year-old high school student. He used Facebook to restore the Pioneer Playhouse, the oldest outdoor theater in Kentucky. Holly Rose, a mother in Phoenix, checked herself for breast cancer after reading a friends status. She found a growth and she was diagnosed in time to stop the disease. The Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, even went jogging with 100 of his Facebook fans.
It’s no secret that Facebook has had a strong impact on society. It allows us to share our identities with friends, family, and the rest of the world. Facebook users can share almost anything about themselves at anytime. We can share information with others in ways we couldn’t have a couple years ago. Just think, if a social networking site like Facebook was powerful enough to save a life, what’s in store for us in the future?
Sources
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=409753352130
www.facebook.com
So it looks like we chose the same topic but took polar opposite approached to it. You for one focused on the fact that the internet gives us the opportunity to expand out identities and clearly used Facebook to base your paper on; while I on the other hand focused on the loss of individuality and looked World of Warcraft and Second Life for my paper.
ReplyDeleteI think your approach to the topic was great and I totally agree with you in that Facebook is a great means to expanding a persons identity and I also think that it is a great tool for people to use for expressing themselves, as is any other social networking site: Twitter, Foursquare, Linkedin, etc...
I like the point you made about the "status" feature on facebook and that it basically gives us some insight into what people are thinking and feeling. But I especially liked the way you explained that Facebook does change the way we look at and value friends and friendship. That it has become mainly about quantity over quality. This is what I was trying to get at in my paper in that the quality of our lives is shrinking due to the internet and virtual reality.
It's cool though how we can pick the same topic and go in completely different directions with it.
Good work so far..
ReplyDeleteyou are going into the mid-term with a B+ or an A-
i know if you take it a little further you will get an A