This weekend, I saw the movie The Social Network. For those of you who don’t know, the movie is about how Facebook was created by Harvard undergrad Mark Zuckerberg with help from a few others (and financial help from his classmate Eduardo Saverin). I highly recommend seeing this movie because it really makes you realize how Facebook changed our social interactions and made it much easier to communicate and be up-to-date with “friends” from across the world. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone said, “The movie of the year that also brilliantly defines the decade.” Travers is right; this past decade will definitely be remembered for this network (created in February 2004) that allows us to easily connect with others.
“Connectedness” is a topic we have been discussing in AIS this year with our oral history project. In our project, we explored the ways people define their society and the degree to which people feel satisfied with their society. This social network, known as Facebook, immensely changed how people can connect with one another. It is easy to access information about “friends” and is a way to online communicate with others any time of day. For those of you who are Facebook users, how has social networking changed your interactions with others? Has it made you feel more connected to others? Or, paradoxically, do you feel less connected because you are communicating behind a screen instead of in person?
Thats an interesting post. I agree that Facebook has completely defined and changed our society. It has even seeped into our language. I was talking with one of my friends on the phone yesterday about something and I said "Oh ya I knew that. I was stalking you yesterday." My mom asked me to please not use that word, stalking, around her because it had a very different connotation for her generation than it does for ours. Facebook has truly changed the way we live.
ReplyDeleteI think that facebook has had both a positive and negative effect on our generation. Positive because it allows us to be more tech-savvy and to communicate with our peers. Negative because many of our interactions that used to be in person are now written on "walls", "threads", "chats", or sent through texts. Even though I love my facebook, I do acknowledge that it's probably going to make our generation worse at interacting with people in person.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I admit to being an avid Facebook user, I agree with Chloe and Ellie that this new form of connecting with others has affected our generation in a negative way. People don't value time spent face-to-face with someone because they feel safer in the privacy of their own Facebook accounts. This can be very dangerous because people will not be as careful online in terms of what they are saying or doing as they would in person. I saw the movie too and I loved it, but it didn't really go into very much detail about how society has changed because of it. It focused mainly on the creation of it and all the scandals throughout the process. I thought this was a great post though.
ReplyDeleteBrooks, Nice job blogging so far this year. Your meta-post is thoughtful and expansive. I like your Social Network post, too, but it'd be nice to anchor your ideas with a text of some kind. you refer to the movie and obliquely to the Travers review, but you don't analyze either text -- or even some specific text from the world of Facebook. How EXACTLY has it helped or hindered your attempts at connecting to people?
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