A community that I identify myself with that is mediated by the Internet is the social networking site Facebook. Facebook is completely mediated by the Internet. Every interaction that takes place through this social networking cite takes place on the web. However, interactions that take place through using Facebook as the medium, may lead to interaction between people face to face.
Facebook can be used in order to maintain relationships with people you currently don’t see as much as you used to as a result of distance or a busy lifestyle, or in order to develop new relationships.
Prior to going to college, I was never into the whole online social networking ordeal. I never made a MySpace account and laughed at those who did. I found it to be so irrelevant. In my opinion, sites like MySpace only purpose was to give people a confidence boost. It was a competition, who had the most friends, who had the most random people telling them how beautiful they were and who could create the most elaborate homepage. I didn’t see any real benefits to having an account.
When I first created my Facebook account, I did so in order to meet people that would be going to the same college as myself. I’m from Long Island and taking the big step of moving 8 hrs away from home was very scary for me, I figured if I could recognize a few familiar faces from Facebook I would be a little more comfortable.
Facebook allows users to communicate through a multitude of different applications. Facebook has a number of features for users to interact with. They include the Wall, a space on every user's profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see, Pokes, which allows users to send a virtual "poke" to each other (a notification that tells a user that they have been poked),Photos, where users can upload albums and photos, and Status, which allows users to inform their friends of their whereabouts and actions. A user's Wall is visible to anyone who is able to see that user's profile, which depends on their privacy settings. In July 2007, Facebook began allowing users to post attachments to the Wall, whereas the Wall was previously limited to textual content only. When I first created my account and was using it primarily as a way of meeting new people, I would often receive messages like “ hey I see we’re both going to Buffalo next year, where are you leaving on campus?” The ability to write on others walls and introduce yourself without the fears of face-to-face interactions enabled users to meet lots of people and create a lot of acquaintance-like relationships.
Now, I used my Facebook account for different purposes. Mainly I use the account to keep in touch with my home friends while I’m at school; the complete opposite reason of why I created the account. Facebook allows me to see what my friends are up to while I’m at school, through photo albums and posts written on their wall. This allows me to remain close to friends that I am separated from by distance, because it gives me the sense of still knowing what’s going on in their lives and enables me to make comments about what their doing or just to say hi so that I am still involved in their life.
Another major aspect of Facebook when creating or maintaining relationships is how quickly and easily it is used. It only takes a few minutes to write on someone’s wall or look at someone’s pictures and comment on them. Also, you can do this while doing a multitude of other things, in contrast sitting down and calling someone and listening to what’s going on in their life, this can be very time consuming. Also, when interacting with someone through a social networking site there is little to no fear of damaging your face. The aspect of rejection is greatly decreased when communicating over the Internet. As a result its easier to meet new people or say things you would normally feel weird saying in person.
Popular social networking sites, including MySpace and Facebook, are changing the human fabric of the Internet.
Citations:
1. http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1463 October 16, 2008
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook October 16, 2008
1 comment:
you know its funny because when i opened a facebook account the sole purpose was to just keep in touch with friends that i couldn't always talk to face to face. i still really don,t use for anything more than that but i see what your saying and i actually have reignited old friendships though that i otherwise probably never would have without facebook.
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