Facebook Guises – Week 4

As discussed in the week 4 lecture podcast 4.3, the way we make sense in our life is through narratives. In order to construct self, we create narrative to help us make sense of what could be a series of random events. Facebook is the social networking website that has provided us with the ability to tell our story, our narrative. With creation of the ‘Timeline’ feature, one page details all the major events we experience, every opinion we voiced and every photograph we shared. However we have reached a point in which Facebook is not about telling the truth, its entirety is based on lies and the wastage of time, money and energy.

The existence of Facebook has given birth to a new culture for the younger generations. It started as a way of providing a small window into people’s lives, to expose the simple and mostly mundane truths that most people are curious about. i.e relationship statuses, birthdays, life updates. But this small window turned to a floodgate of lies, similar to the James Frey scandal. People feel that that since they are so exposed to everyone they must lie in order to satisfy their peers, similar to any social pressure. However, Facebook took judgment to a global scale. So, Facebook no longer became about connecting people, eventually it became apparent that all the friends you may have, are not really your friends, not at all people you are in physical contact with. They are virtual acquaintances, yet even these people who we barely know and don’t ever speak to are people that we are trying to impress, through the medium of Facebook and the tools in which the site provides.  “People are conscious of who is viewing their online constructions and thus, they actively construct the ideal self formation in line with how they want to be perceived. Therefore, the online construction of the self is influenced by the individual's offline social identities or subjective positions (Chatora, 2010)”, (Heivadi, et al, 2013)

 

You want to have more and more friends because that is a measure of popularity, the more friends you have the more people like you. Photographs are no longer immortalized memories; they are belittled into a selfie, ways of showing off superficial entities to people who don’t care about you. In the end I wonder who invented these new standards of cool. And just how far do we have to stretch the truth about our selves to satisfy Facebook.

References:

• Heivadi, T., M.A., & Khajeheian, D., PhD. (2013). Construction of social identity in social media: An investigation of iranian users' appearance in facebook. Interdisciplinary Journal of Contemporary Research in Business, 4(12), 547-555. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1370189880?accountid=16285
• Week 4 lecture podcast BA1002, 4.3, Network Narratives.