Facebook and the People Who Use It
On page 51 of Dijck’s Culture of Connectivity we learned about why people are signing up for Facebook. “The principle benefits for users are, first, to get and stay connected and, second, to become (well) connected.” Through this, we can see that people just want to be connected with other people. Facebook allows us to “friend” people and keep up to date on what is happening on their day to day lives. We are always connected through Facebook until one of the parties blocks the other.
The main goal of Facebook is to be open and connected with others. (d p 51). Each user can do whatever they want to do freely — friend, unfriend, post pictures, videos, post statuses, anything really- as long as it does not interfere with the website’s TOS and policies.
One of the reasons people stay with Facebook is that users are able to involve themselves in mass communication (D. p 51). Being able to add friends on the website makes it seem like the user has many friends, but many of the ties are weak or really far out friendships. Nowadays, people only use Facebook as all other websites, such as Myspace and Friendster.
People share whatever they want, leaving a blur between public and private information. Sometimes people overshare information that generally would be private but for whatever reason, they want others to know it happened — from personal experience, one of these things are graphic pictures of injuries that may make some other users uncomfortable. These probably should not be shown because of their light gore resemblance, and they may even be thrown into that category.
In Cognitive Surplus by Shirky, he talks about motivation by instrinsic and extrinsic values. Extrinsics is all about the feedback one gets, and Facebook fuels this immensely. Users get feedback constantly with likes and other reactions as well as comments on the things they post.
And then there are intrinsic motivations which are “strong enough that they gravitate towards experiences that reward them” (Shirky pg. 93) This is where users may post something to brag about so everyone else can see their accomplishments.
Unfortunately, many users are casual internet users and sometimes post information that could lead to trouble in the future, such as a credit card number or phone number, or something that others do not agree with. This is a problem that they must tackle on their own and knowing what to post where and when. Becoming aware of how we make our presence known on social media is the key to having a safe and secure social media experience.
