Since its infancy, humans have
been using the Internet for what we do best; create communities and grow
relationships. It began as a trickle with the UseNet newsgroups in the early
1980’s, and awkward email provider AOL continued it in the 90’s. Yahoo! And MSN made instant
messenger popular, and then Friendster and MySpace made the first attempts to
evolve social media into its full potential. None of them anticipated Mark
Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Originally available only to college students, Facebook
graduated with the Millennial generation and followed them to work, rapidly
subsuming the majority of demographics in North America and eventually drawing
even grandma into its gaping maw. Now we have many networks to choose from,
each addressing a slightly different social need. Linkedin is for
professionals, Twitter is for celebrity hounds, and Instagram is for
illiterates*. But Facebook, the social media geared for personal life, is king
of them all. Social media has created new ways for people to interact, resulting
in much confusion and testing our adaptability. Though human
nature remains unchanged by the advent of Facebook and social media in general,
our nature is prodded into new behavior by the exponentially larger audience we
may engage with through these social networks than before. This post explores
exactly what Facebook is, how it works, and some of the rules that have emerged
regarding its use.
Because many social media
accounts are linked to multifarious activities on the web, it is difficult to
accurately determine how many active users any one brand has. However, it is a
safe gamble to say that Facebook is perceived as the social network, beating out competitors such as Twitter and
Google+ not by thousands or even tens or hundreds of thousands, but by millions
of users. This favored social network is used to maintain contact between
people via Internet, with every variation such an open ended application implies.
The social aspect of Facebook is easy to spot. Users are encouraged to fill out
a profile citing where they live, work and general interests, and to make their
page available to people they know in real life. The program helpfully asks
“what’s on your mind?,” and if you respond your friends and acquaintances that
you have added have instant access to your private musings so easily made
public. Pictures may be uploaded and discussed, and various applications may be
used to tweak the experience, typically by allowing friends to play games with
one another. Furthermore, comments made on a status update or picture are
visible not only to the original poster, but also to all of the original
poster’s friends. The results are that on Facebook, all of the social circles
that were once kept apart from one another may be merged in a spectacular Venn
diagram of human interaction, allowing friends of the user to see a side of
them that they have never seen, and possibly never wanted to see, before. This
semi voluntary network is what separates software like Facebook from any other social medium.
Where phone conversations are typically personal interactions between two
parties, and emails require a user to individually list every recipient, Facebook
is an inordinately easy method for firing information in a scattershot to all
friends at once, provided they are also users. This ease has provided a
somewhat socially acceptable means for communicating and displaying whatever
takes the users’ fancy, from mundane complaints and favorite quotes, to news
articles links supporting favored causes and “selfies,” or pictures taken of
ones’ self with a camera phone in the mirror, with apparent bonus points if the
lips are flattened to mimic the bill of a duck.
In some cases relationships are
formed and facilitated exclusively through the medium, but more often Facebook
is used to supplement offline relationships. Facebook is particularly helpful
in maintaining contact between individuals that are geographically separated to
a degree where regular face to face interactions are not practical, such as an
interstate or transnational relationship. However, when coupled with
smartphones, Facebook enables individuals to interact with every one of their
friends simultaneously, and from any location. Thus, users may live in constant
community with every individual of personal consequence to date, from the old
high school bestie now living in Toronto to the roommate who is currently using
your soap.
Like any other social medium,
Facebook has acquired its own set of rules for acceptable behavior. Individual
communities will always have their idiosyncratic mannerisms, but on a broad
scale Facebook users have established a set of general expectations for those
that share the network. Though Facebook taboos are too numerous to discuss in
detail here, a few of the most important ones will be highlighted. The first concerns
who a user should invite into their network in the first place. Though some
users have a tendency to “friend” even their most casual acquaintances, it is
generally considered wise to accept only individuals that would be considered
friends in real life. Thus, bosses and subordinates, distant relatives, and a
fellow classmate you once had an interesting conversation with may not be the
best candidates for a Facebook friend. The second important rule is selecting
what to say on the network. Since many users have learned to socially interact
on a far more limited scale than what Facebook offers, it is easy for them to
forget that every other user in their network can see what they type. Conversation
topics that are acceptable for some relationships could be too much information
for others. Additionally, since Facebook takes place on the Internet,
everything posted on it is essentially permanent. Words typed in anger,
passion, foolishness or ignorance, can never be taken back or deleted. Thus,
users are encouraged to be mindful of what they say on Facebook. “Tagging” a friend in a photo or post that
they may find embarrassing is equally taboo, as it indicates that the tagger is
only concerned with their direct relationship to the tagee, without any regard
for the tagee’s other relationships. This leads to the next Facebook rule;
narcissism should be held in check. There is a small degree of selfishness that
is expected; by posting a status update a user assumes that at least a few of
their friends will care about what they are saying. However, persistently bombarding friends with pictures
of a pet or child, links and comments with a religious or political theme, a
sickeningly public romance, or even simply making too many posts, monopolizes
the conversation and implies that the user thinks his own life is more
interesting and worthwhile than his friends. Finally, though Facebook was
created to bring people together, it is possible to use it to isolate and
persecute others. Negative comments can be made just as easily as positive ones,
for example, and since the default setting is to send information to everybody,
deliberately omitting individuals from seeing posts can be a subtle but
powerful way to demean other users. These are just a few rules established on
Facebook, but they are largely informal and are often discovered only after
they have been violated.
This concludes part I
*Instagram is a very cool idea with some amazing artistic
possibilities, but in practical application it falls short of its potential
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