Buzz About Social Media » social media connections

Facebook Incorrectly Mimics Real Life

writersbasement — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:25:03 +0000

By:Liana Fahie

I never quite understood the entire appeal of online social networking. It always seemed to appeal to peoples’ vain side, often times promoting relentless self promotion. Some people swear by the notion that once we aren’t Facebook friends we’re no longer friends in real life. Ian Bogost presented some convincing arguments about the way structure of Facebook’s network and how it leads to a mesh of different relationship hierarchies that should be separated. The only current remedy for this is privacy settings that enable you to show select bits of information to certain people; but a finer granularity is needed now that the user base has exponentially grown and anyone is allowed to sign up. Professors are interacting with students, colleagues, family, and friends all at the same time and the politics involved in who can see aspects of your life not only about you but extending to others that you know is a tremendous balancing act.

The problem is that it lumps everyone that you know under a single category;the “friend,” whether you met this person at a party last night, went to elementary school with them, or you have known them pretty much your whole life. Today with the Internet and the explosion of smart phones, people are able to carry Facebook everywhere they go. This leads to the depersonalization of the relationships and interactions with people. For example, you can probably change your birthday to occur once every 3 months and people will tell you happy birthday every time. As they don’t remember when your birthday is, they just digest the information that the site is showing them.

Ian’s notion of a collapsed sense of time is accurate, as Facebook does not allow you to specify a time period on the relationships that you have. The example that he gave of a guy posting that he was engaged and receiving congratulations as if it just happened is very true and is similar to my birthday example from above. However this sense of time can play into the strategy that the owners of Facebook want. They want you to update your profile and status right away when things happen, as if your Facebook profile is an extension of your physical self. In this way updating Facebook and letting people know of important changes in your life, products you like, etc., contributes to their overarching goal of Facebook being your second life.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, networking, Social Media

Facebook’s Timeline Dissappoints

writersbasement — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:39:32 +0000

Written by: Michael Arnold

In late September of 2011, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the website’s most significant change since its inception – the Timeline. In a press release Zuckerberg defined Facebook’s new layout as “the story of your life, and it has three pieces, all your stories, all your apps, in a new way to express who you are.”

Sounds intriguing. However, Facebook’s new layout has received some terrible reviews by users. On a Mashable Social Media Poll posted in mid-December, roughly half of the 3,000 Facebook users polled expressed their discontentment with the Timeline. Many users are resisting the change from the original profile all together after seeing the confusing and cumbersome Timeline page.

So what’s with all of the feet dragging?

The Los Angeles Times likens the Timeline to “an obsessive compulsive’s digital scrapbook, collecting every detail, no matter how trivial, in chronological order.” Sound creepy? That’s because it is.

Timeline tracks your “birth” – or rather your first time using Facebook – to the present moment. It incessantly surfaces photos, likes, tags, places you’ve been and notes to effectively capture the essence of any given Facebook user on one page.

Zuckerberg’s move to Timeline drifts from the website’s initial purpose: to help people connect and share with the people in their lives. Instead, the focus of Facebook will become the chronological “life story” of the person whose page it is.

Not only are Timeline pages revealing more about people’s pasts, they’re promoting constant moment-by-moment updates every day. Facebook’s new partnerships with Spotify and Hulu have already begun allowing users to bombard news feeds with interminable and automatic updates on songs that they’re listening to and shows that they’re watching. Clearly this change is much less about communication, and more about voyeurism.

Timeline makes it easier than ever to get complete access to a person’s photos and interests. And with the page’s built-in archive, it is simple and easy to see what a person was doing at any particular point in her life on Facebook.

Since the change took effect Facebook has been encouraging users, in a multitude of ways, to add more information to their profile’s. Zuckerberg has not shied away from this. In fact, upon unveiling the Timeline at Facebook’s F8 Conference, he concluded that “life’s biggest moments” should be made more public since this is the overall purpose of the new layout.

Perhaps Facebook’s dramatic changes will deter some of its 800 million members from using the site as often. As this is unlikely, Facebook users should prepare to get to know a whole lot more about their “friends” in the coming months.

The Facebook logo

Technorati Tags: Dissappointing, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Social Media, Social Networking, Timeline

BlogSwarm: The Power of Social Media to Raise Awareness

Lincoln Rose — Tue, 11 May 2010 01:21:19 +0000

Can you feel the rumble moving across the Net? Is it a server malfunction? The train outside your tiny apartment? No, it’s a band of bloggers swarming across the Sphere, bringing truth and justice to the top ranks of your google search! The now widely used Blogswarm is another tool used in social media to raise awareness of important news and issues.

But what is a blogswarm, and how does it work? A blogswarm happens when groups of bloggers, out of urgent need or pre-arranged agreement, all write posts about the same issue and urge others to write. Recently we had a ’swarm where bloggers encouraged people to contact their representatives and ask them to vote yes on the Employment Nondiscrimination Act. That was motivated by situational need. In other cases, a specific day of the year will come around, and folks will agree to write posts on a topic that’s close to their hearts. For example, May 1st was Blog Against Disablism Day, where people write about disability issues. It’s been going on since 2006.

Do BlogSwarms really help? Yes. And just as important, they’re a ton of fun! You get to join together with others across the blogosphere, and for one day everyone has the same goal: get more people to care/understand/do something about X, Y, or Z. There’s also alot of freedom in it, because everyone crafts their own message, as long as the end result is the same. A ‘swarm is a great way to reach down into the pool of information we all wade through, pull one thing out, and let the Net World know that a lot of people think this is worth knowing about.

Try it for yourself! There’s plenty of ‘swarms out there waiting for another blogger to join the pack. Or set up your own swarm day! Choose a date and topic, post about it, send links out to other bloggers, and let the word fly! A blogswarm is one more tool we have for keeping folks connected to what’s going on around them.