Facebook: Connect and Share

Created in 2004, Facebook has quickly become one of the most widely used social media sites in the world. With 1.2 billion users signed- up across the globe in December of 2012 (Statistic Brain, 2012), Facebook has become a platform through which various communities, friends and families can interact with each other via chat, video, blogs and, most prominently, photo-sharing (Weaver, 2010).

Facebook offers an easy, user-friendly way to navigate the ever-expanding virtual network. Anyone can access it, free of charge, giving each individual the ability to directly access (or, as direct as a virtual network can be) any other individual of their choosing, should privacy settings allow it. Recently, Facebook has become the forum through which many people, especially those of a younger demographic, share their day to day activities and, most importantly, emotions.

Facebook has created a new breed of travellers that one might call the Cyber-Flaneur (Barnes, 1997). Similarly to those wandering the cities of Paris spoken of in historical texts, the Cyber-Flaneur has been known to spend excessive hours browsing Facebook and taking part in an activity that has recently been coined ‘stalking’. Although a new way to view the word, recently I have discovered that Facebook is, very much so, a panopticon of its own, with users under constant surveillance by not only the Facebook team, but also friends, family and unknown surveyors, for those who are not strict with their privacy settings (Wilkinson, 2013).

Having grown up a third-culture kid, Facebook has provided me with a way through which I can keep track of, and in contact with various friends I have made over the years. Facebook has allowed me to maintain friendships with those in different countries and time-zones, who without it, I would have lost contact with, perhaps, immediately.

In a blog entry posted by Mark Zuckerberg himself, he states that his “mission at Facebook is to help make the world more open and connected.” (Zuckerberg, 2010). Over the years and countless hours I, myself have spent on Facebook, I have come to realize that he has achieved this goal and more. In the text by Denis wood, ‘Multiple Truth of the Mappable World’ he states that “We need a local point of view to get across town. We need a comparative perspective to get sizes right. We need the point of view of a compass to fly across the ocean.” (Wood D. et al, 2006). Facebook has become this point of view, this ‘compass point’ as wood put it; it has become the map, used by individuals all over the world, to navigate the ever-expanding, increasingly chaotic virtual network.

Reference List:

Barnes, G. (1997). Passage of the cyber-flaneur. Retrieved from:

            http://www.raynbird.com/essays/Passage_Flaneur.html

Statistic Brain. (2012, December 11). Social Networking Statistics. Retrieved from: http://www.statisticbrain.com/social-networking-statistics/

 Weaver, A. (2010, November). Facebook and other pandora's boxes.  Access, 24(4), 24-32.

Wilkinson, R. (2013) BA1002 Our Space: Networks, Narrative and the Making of Place.

            Week 2 Notes.            Retrieved from: http://learnjcu.edu.au

Wood D. (2006). et al. ‘The Multiple Truths of the Mappable World’. In Seeing Through

            Maps.

Zuckerberg, M. (2010). 500 million stories. Retrieved from

            http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=409753352130

Image: Facebook Map. Retrieved from: https://www.facebook.com/?l_s=c