Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Questions and Comments on Facebook

As stated before, I never really got into Facebook.  This is mostly because I kept to myself in high school, and outside of my group of close friends, had little desire for interaction  on an impersonal scale.  I didn't really see the reason to friend as many people from my school as possible to simply continue ignoring them.  I recently started using it for family contact (my relatives kept asking me why I hadn't accepted their friend requests and I got tired of explaining to them that I hadn't logged in for several months).

When Levinson brought up sending a friend request to someone who shared an interest with him (the one who responded with "Uh, are we like, going to hang out"), I found a parallel between the invited persons views and my own.  Why does the word "friend" attract so much more attention than the more impersonal phrases of "followers" and "subscribe". 

I am also a bit skeptical of the idea that Facebook friends can be used as a knowledge base.  It may work, but if  you're asking an online "friend" for information about a topic, it is likely a good idea to research the subject through other methods (particularly if they don't have much of a name for themselves).  It just seems like more work to find a person's knowledge of something and then research his credentials or the topic further.

Finally, we've all heard the phrase "It's not official until it's Facebook official" or some variation of it.  Why is it that we have the need to have our online persona be our real selves?  Does posting happenings in our lives validate the change in some way?

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