Facebook Me!

A group which is partially or completely mediated by the internet? The first thing to come to my mind was Facebook. 2 years ago, I had no idea what Facebook was and today, I can’t go a day without looking at it at least five times. Facebook is a site where college students (however, lately practically anyone can have it) have a profile about themselves and where they go to school. You can request to be someone’s friend who shares the same interests as you who attends your own school, and send messages, write on their wall, or give them a nice poke. “What differentiates social network sites [6] from other computer-mediated communication sites is the feature that allows participants to articulate and publicly display their relations to others in the system, which, in turn, allows viewers to traverse the network. Once a user finds a Profile of a friend (or anyone else), they can “add” them. This sends a message to the other user requesting Friendship. If the recipient approves the connection [7], the relationship is visible through both users’ list of Friends. The Friends list typically includes a list of photos or handles with links to that person’s Profile” (Boyd 2006). You can put as much personal information as you’d like on Facebook, and most people at least post their picture, screen name, and e-mail address so that it’s easy to contact new friends.

At first, I didn’t know what to think. Would someone think it was weird if I “friended” them? I went to Niagara University my freshmen year, and I ended up getting over ninety friend requests before school even started. I had these people asking to be my friend, and then when I saw them on campus, It was like I knew who they were and a little about them thanks to Facebook. There are big groups, for example now I belong to the SUNY Buffalo group and the Niagara University group, and I can access anyone’s profile from either school (if they haven’t set up the privacy options). The strange thing to me is, some of the friends who added me on Niagara’s Facebook, pretended that they didn’t know who I was in person, or didn’t acknowledge that we had messaged each other or talked online. I find that strange how people differ online than in person, how you can make a friend on the internet who doesn’t want to talk in person.

“On September 5, 2006, Facebook introduced two new controversial features called "News Feed" and "Mini-Feed". The first of the new features, News Feed, appears on every Facebook member's home page, displaying recent Facebook activities of a member's friends. The second feature, Mini-Feed, keeps a log of similar events on each member's profile page.[28] Members can manually delete items from their Mini-Feeds if they wish to do so” (Wikipedia 2007). Facebook has gotten pretty personal, and I was one of the students who was against the news feed at first. However, you see the recent news of your friends, and not just random people at your school. Also, Facebook has made many privacy options to comply with the users requests. I think that Facebook is a great group to belong to in college. I think its fun to find people who share the same interests as me that go to the same school. I also think it’s fun to write on my friend’s wall’s, send messages, and poke my boyfriend (even though a lot of people don’t even know the point of the poke, it’s still fun). I’m always game for new friends at UB so…Facebook Me!



Facebook. (2007, March 19). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 23:40, March 19, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Facebook&oldid=116288609

Boyd, Danah (2006, December). Friends, Friendsters, and Fop 8: Writing community into being on social network sites. Retrieved March 19, 2007, from http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_12/boyd/index.html