Facebook is a social networking site launched in February of 2004, that currently has over 900 million users. Members can create a profile, upload and share pictures and other media, post statuses, view and comment on friends' statuses, and play simple online games.
Cool - Elaina
Facebook helps people reconnect and stay in touch with friends and/or acquaintances by way of status updates, comments, pictures, messages, and even video chat. Facebook can help people maintain a sense of community with people who are important to them regardless of whether or not they can physically come together. This can help ease the transition of moving away from someone's hometown for school or a job opportunity, or even separation caused by a military deployment or severe medical needs.In Rewired, Rosen talks about how the iGeneration thrives on multi-tasking. Facebook is the perfect outlet for multi-taskers, especially with the addition of their new side feature that constantly updates and shows friends' actions occurring in real time. To most teens today, the idea of completing one task at a time is unimaginable and a waste of time (pages 32-34), and Facebook has adapted to fit with this generation. While most people didn't like the new Timeline layout at first, many are coming to realize the potential it has to become a new way to document our lives. Where people used to write private journals, most people use Facebook as their outlet for expression. Having access to millions of people's 'journals' will potentially provide future generations with the largest cumulative memoir ever recorded in human history.
Not Cool - Jocelyn
I managed to find an entire Wiki page dedicated to the criticisms of FacebookAs always, there are the technical problems. Facebook surpassed Myspace years ago, yet it still doesn't support the same level of customization. Timeline helps a little by allowing you a second photo (the cover photo) on your wall, but you can still only use plain text and you’re pretty much stuck with Facebook’s default layout.
Many users have complained about the lack of live customer support and the faulty automated message system in place to resolve issues. Account deactivation is also a hassle (and somewhat of an emotional roller coaster from what I've heard).
Facebook uses tracking cookies to monitor page visits by facebook users and non-members.
Reportedly, 20-33% of divorce suits in the UK cited Facebook as a cause.
Photo recognition and face tagging: for the past year, Facebook has been making it easier for us to upload every picture on our cameras and tag all our friends and family at once by introducing face recognition. After the first few tags, Facebook will remember the people in your album and other recent photos and suggest them to you while tagging. While the feature can be disabled, many people are concerned about the invasion of privacy that this feature implies.
Psychological Effects: much of the criticism Facebook receives is from people claiming that it increases stress levels and can even cause depression. Facebook has also been accused of promoting anorexic and bulimic content through advertising.
Identity Theft and Defamation: like all social sites that allow anyone to create an account, Facebook makes it easy to impersonate others. In July of 2008, the High Court in London passed the first successful invasion of privacy and defamation verdict over a post on a social site against a man who created a false account of a former friend and used it to demean him.
Even advertisers are wary of Facebook and often have their ads removed when they are shown on the pages of controversial people or groups.
Effects on Education:
Students have faced disciplinary action by their schools for posting inappropriate content on their Facebook.
Several articles have been published describing the negative effects of using sites like Facebook during class or while studying.
Most people use Facebook to “stalk” friends and play games (like WWF and Farmville), which has been negatively correlated to student involvement.
Students have faced disciplinary action by their schools for posting inappropriate content on their Facebook.
Several articles have been published describing the negative effects of using sites like Facebook during class or while studying.
Most people use Facebook to “stalk” friends and play games (like WWF and Farmville), which has been negatively correlated to student involvement.
Although the negative effects of social media are serious and extreme downfalls, I honestly feel that social media will continue to exponentially grow. The connections that have been formed socially, educationally, artistically, and intellectually are too strong to be broken, in my opinion. Many people worldwide have a tie to his or her social media accounts that often times are updated multiple times a day. We as humans have evolved our communication into a more technological one, large in part to social media's popularity. Most people would agree that the increased stress levels or identity theft, among other risks, are worth the joy and connection created through social media. As its growth progresses, we have begun to see social media implemented into our economical world also. This even furthers my belief that social media has become too engraved in our daily lives to lessen its popularity.
ReplyDeleteI feel like Facebook receives too much negative feedback and comments considering the number of users, frequency of usage, and "dependency" on it now. There may be privacy issues, but there always will be no matter what social networking website it is. Facebook is completely aware of this and is constantly attempting to provide as much privacy protection as possible including blocking people and controlling who can view certain content. What others see is largely dependent on user and what he/she chooses to disclose and share. In the bigger picture, Facebook is being integrated into so many places in so many industries and I can only see it growing even larger. Its usage has become so much more than making friends and posting comments on their walls.
ReplyDeleteJust because everyone uses it does not vindicate Facebook from criticism. Although Facebook originated to connect classmates in the real world, Facebook's main function now is to waste people's time. Getting on Facebook usually means reading meaningless status updates and mindlessly browsing friends' photo albums.
ReplyDeleteA study at Brown University in 2007 showed that people who regularly look at fbk photo albums come to believe that other people have genuinely better lives than they do. People who do not browse fbk albums rate themselves more often as content with their lives. Fbk albums' disembodied reels of happy times results directly in the viewer devaluing their own lives and forgetting that other people have problems.
Facebook supplies social information without social connection. It also offers social affirmation in the form of "likes." This is all some people need to forego making new friends or investing in old friendships. Like the Brown study showed, fbk can change and likely distort our perceptions of other people and thus how we conduct our relationships.
Facebook can be used in ways that help us out or that harm us. With such an easy and addictive website, we really need to step back and ask ourselves how it makes us feel when we use it and whether we might be better off doing something else.
Having dropped Facebook a few weeks ago, I can definitely speak to the reality that is an addiction to this social media site. For the first few days, I was constantly searching for an outlet to quench my vanity that had previously been satisfied by “likes.” Honestly, it scared me. I had been using Facebook to define me and as a “wall” to hide behind, not as a supplement to connect with friends, but as a complete replacement. Currently, my position towards Facebook is that it needs to be a supplement to one’s own well-established social life. These last few weeks have forced me to reach out to others, initiate relationships, and find out about events exclusively advertised on Facebook. Many thanks to this class and my classmates for helping me realize the social media hole that I was in; I encourage everyone to take a step back, evaluate their “relationship” with Facebook, and consider leaving it for a time.
ReplyDeleteInteresting! Not only are the social consequences bad, but also the effect on our brain. Nicholas Carr talks about how we browse to our leisure, but we are giving up our ability to concentrate for better hand-eye coordination. Facebook wastes time, causes unusual identity burdens, and hurts brain power. We are better together, but Facebook deals more with causes us to feel seperate.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading Turkle's book "Alone Together", Facebook comes to mind as one of the technologies that puts us into a constant virtual world with a virtual identity. People can mold into a character they want to be presented as on Facebook. In "Alone Together", Turkle says, "Early in my study, a college senior warned me not to be fooled by 'anyone you interview who tells you that his Facebook page is the real me. It's like being in a play. You make a character.'". With the editing and photoshopping of today, people can become whoever they want online. It's a scary idea, and this idea leads to Turkle's thoughts about "Presentation anxiety". People begin to have anxiety about the way they are presented online where the world can find them.
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