Facebook...

My life in online social networks didn't begin until I was coming to this college for the first time 4 years ago and unfortunately it only lasted about a year or so until I lost interest / became uncomfortable with the whole idea of having your life laid out for everyone. Looking back now I actually recall the when I decided that logging on was no longer worth my time. It was when the "news feed" was originally introduced into the program around 2006 or so. I remember looking at that and immediately not liking it. When I first began with the community, if you wanted to know something about an individual you had to take the time to actually visit their page and some what interact with them. With the introduction of the "news feed" all of you and your "friends" immediately began broadcasting all changes that we're made on your page, into this public forum of your peers. I understand that after some time they did implement privacy controls to allow you decide what content you wanted to put on the feed but at that point I was personally feeling that focus of the site had shifted into being mainly gossip.

For the class I decide to take the dive and re open Facebook for the first time in the last couple of years and I have to admit I was rather impressed in the way it reverted into such a powerful communication tool. It really has grown allot and to be honest I was kinda overwhelmed by the amount of options you have available to you as compared to the last time I evaluated it.

The article I read for the class was entitled "The Brave New World of Digital Intimacy" it discussed how people react to changing means of social networking and it even addressed some of the issues I had with the "News Feed" when it first came out. In the article they go into how in this new digital age people are going have to be "streched to become comfortable with things that they aren't yet comfortable with." And how "A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.” So it follows true to form, that as it become more acceptable to have your life made public in a digital forum that facebook would slowly take over to the point today where it is accepting a million new users a day from all over the world.