Over the past decade, the social networking phenomenon has grown in popularity to the extent of having substantial effect on culture of different people around the world. The growth of such social media platforms as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Zing, etc have seen the personal and professional lives of many people gradually become inundated with the online platforms (Dijck 24). Facebook as a leading social network site has almost become the preferred platform for not only sharing communicative and effective content, but also for building professional careers and enjoying online social lives.
The proliferation of Facebook has significantly impacted on the way of life people around the world in the sense that approximately 1.15 billion people have moved the bulk of their social, cultural, and professional activities to the online environment. In a span of less than a decade, Facebook has resulted in the emergence of a new infrastructure for both online sociality and creativity, in so doing penetrating every aspect of our culture today (Dijck 26).
Facebook has presented a new online means by which millions of people make sense of their lives. This is especially the case because Facebook now influences our human interactions on individual, community, and the larger societal level. This leading social network can be credited for bringing about transformation from a previously networked communication system to the current “platformed” sociality, and indeed a shift from a participatory culture to the present culture of “connectivity” (Dijck 29).
While traditional media wielded full control over their one-way broadcasting and publishing channels, Facebook has introduced interactivity and participatory by affording its user the power to not only talk back but also send messages instantly. Facebook is indeed a highly interactive platform that has made culture more participatory, collaborative, and user centered (Dijck 36). The term “social media” that has become almost synonymous with Facebook translates that the platform is user centered and facilitates communial activities, while the term “participatory” stresses human collaboration. The social network site has significantly enhanced the innate human need to both connect and create (Dijck 41).
Facebook has introduced us to a new world characterized by convergence culture, a world in which old media and new media collide, where there is intersection of grassroots and corporate media, as well as where the power of the media producer and that of the media consumer now interact in unprecedented ways (Dijck 45). As the founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg envisioned in 2010, the social networking site has transformed the world into a more open and transparent place for all of us. Zuckerberg has espoused again and again that the mission of Facebook is to enable “people to find what they want and connect them to ideas they like online.”
In this regard, there is no doubt that Facebook has become an online enhancer or facilitator of human networks i.e. webs of people promoting connectedness as a key social value. These human networks facilitate spreading of individual ideas, values and preferences besides influencing the way of thinking of individuals and their actions. In order to make sense of what users want and like, Facebook codes relationships between individuals, objects, and ideas into algorithms so as to track their desires (Dijck 46). This results in sociality that has been coded by technology that makes people’s activities formal, manageable, enabling Facebook to engineer sociality in individual’s everyday activities.
Reference:
Dijck, José . The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Print.
