Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Facebooking has demolished "Face to Face"
Facebook is a social network where friends, family, and strangers can communicate. It provides its users with an easy, user friendly medium to transport information rapidly, all over the globe. It decreases the time in which users respond and recieve messages, but does it decrease space? It eliminates a barrier between two people, but as a society does it not distance us more? Marshall Mcluhan finds problems with new media; this being one of them. The issue is that society is increasing emotional, and physical barriers between one another through online networks. We lose the realism in communicating and the face to face experience with one another.
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Hey Jenna:
I'm intrigued by the notion that a system like facebook might increase the distance between people - how exactly might this occur? What aspects of the system or of its use contribute to this increased distance?
Ted, I am so glad you asked that! The reason I feel this way about facebook is because of my own personal experiences with the people I communicate with. They use Facebook as an efficient way to say what they need to say, but the value and experience of "getting together" no longer exists. It is quite said that I can admit that I have had entire conversations with people on Facebook that live down my block! I am not going to deny that, I have fallen a victim to this networking society and, I could choose to make the effort to plan "get togethers". However, Facebook has made it so convienant for all of us to just sit at home and communicate with one another that we no longer have to make the effort to physically see each other. Instead of calling people up or going for coffee I find myself catching up with people that I have not seen for months over Facebook. The more I have thought about it, the more impersonal and less meaningful these conversations become. What does that truly say about my friendship with them? ( I am still figuring that out). Facebook has many postivite attributes and I do not mean to say that this network is corruptive. It allows people to keep in touch from all over the world and through written words it brings people together. But physically, Facebook distances us from one another because of the easy access, and social situations it sets up for us. I think I would relate this to Baudrillards critique on how virtual experiences intertwine with real experiences. By this, I mean that how we communicate on for example, Facebook, in which we write messages, write on someone's wall, make comments on photos and so forth, is starting to become a reality in how we communicate and have social experiences with one another in the physical form. We text instead of call, email instead of call, email instead of getting together, send pictures from computers and phones. Overall, these actions which are performed on facebook are distancing us in reality.
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