Jess Harries Blog 1

                                              

I was not someone that agreed with the idea of Facebook when it first started to become popular. I didn’t understand the concept of putting my life out there for everyone to see and as a year 11 student was pressured to start using Facebook. Other students at school created an account for me and I started using it out of curiosity and the fear of being on the outside.

I think Facebook is an online space where people like to put up the nice and exciting moments in their lives for friends and family to enjoy, but I also think this can have a negative effect on society, creating a false sense of reality. In a virtual space, you are not the only person constructing your identity, (Van Luyn, 2015)

Facebook is all about small worlds. It connects people who have mutual friends, with other people and so on. Though mutual friends alone I would be easily able to access almost everyone in this City through one or two friends. Facebook itself as a website in the last 5-10 years has made the world we live in smaller than ever before. As stated in Buchanan’s “small worlds” ‘Humanity is an immensely complicated network of more than 6 billion individuals’, and if majority are users of a social networking site like Facebook then that automatically connects me to most of humanity (Buchanan, 2002). It’s a crazy idea to think that this is even possible.

Even though I am a part of the Facebook and social network generation it’s still alarms me that we can sit alone in a room for days but still be connected to everyone that matters to us in our lives, rather than going out and actually living it.

Jess Harries

References

Buchanan, M. (2002). Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks. New York : W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Retrieved August 12, 2015

Van Luyn, A. (2015). Space and Identity: Genre and Transformation. Slide 24. Lecture notes distributed in BA1002. Date accessed 12 August, 2015.

Photo From: http://infospace.ischool.syr.edu/2012/07/10/facebook-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/