Transcend Time and Space in 3 Easy Steps!

Have you ever wanted to transcend space and time? Well now you can in three easy steps! Step 1- Sign into Facebook, step 2 – choose a friend and write something on their wall, and step 3- press POST! Congratulations! You have just experienced the wonderful world of technology!
Not quite understanding how Facebook just helped you transcend time and space? Well with the handy dandy reading of this blog post, you will too understand the wonders of Facebook! First we must start off with the internet with which we are capable of transmitting information faster and more efficiently than ever before! Back in the day, when you wanted to communicate with a person, you had to travel ALL the way to go see them (or send someone) to deliver your message. And if you had sent your message via a messenger, you had to wait ALL the way for them to come back to relay the response! This of course took a considerable amount of time. However with applications such as Facebook and other online social networking sites you can send a message, and if the other person happens to be on Facebook at the same time, even if they are all the way across the world, they will receive the message right away and fire a response right back which will appear at your end instantaneously! No longer do you have to wait for the inconveniences of waiting around for that lazy messenger to come back with your reply, or have to resort to travelling ALL the way to see the person JUST to deliver a message. The internet and Facebook allow us to transcend the limits of space and the accompanying time of travel to be able to communicate instantaneously – this causes what Mcluhan calls the global village where our sense of time and space have become compressed, and access to the world seems limitless. So next time you feel like experiencing the joys of transcending time and space, just sign on to Facebook and leave a buddy across the road, or across the world a message!

Information as Public Property

Information is defined as any knowledge that is communicated or received, concerning a particular fact or circumstance. A key factor about information is that it is a both a commodity and a public good. Once information is produced, it is virtually inexhaustible, and any consumption of information has the potential to create more information. Once information is posted online, these qualities are magnified because not only can it be sent out; it can be replicated exactly, and stored. Therefore, if we are following that definition, anything we post up on Facebook is information and therefore public property.
Did you know that anything you post up on Facebook no longer belongs to you and is owned by Facebook? This goes for comments, wall postings, pictures, favourite movies, relationship statuses... Facebook is a prime example of how technology has created a means for the cultural value of the communication of information. It allows us to post up information and easily publish it for the entire world to see. However with this ease comes the danger of becoming reckless with what we publish online; it is only too easy to post up those photos of you posing with a 26oz of vodka or having a drinking competition with friends. At the moment, these pictures may seem funny however; these photos portray vital information about you to the public which includes potential employers and schools and can permanently tarnish your image. This could result in you being passed over for entrance into a school of choice or even deem you unemployable. It just goes to show you that you have to be careful with what you post online- because anything that you do instantly no longer belongs to just you.

Facebook the antagonist of productivity

Imagine this scenario. You arrive home after a long day at school, drop your bag down on the floor, and pull out that assignment you’ve been procrastinating on forever. You look at the clock – its 5:00 PM and decide that there’s definitely enough time to get that assignment done before the midnight due date. You sit down in front of your computer and sign into Facebook just to check if you have any new messages or wall postings. You browse around the site and laugh at your friend’s photos from an “animal themed” party, write on a couple people’s walls, send a message to your best friend, comment on a picture or two… Content that you have done enough daily socializing, you look up at the clock only to realize that it’s 9:00 PM! That can’t be right, you check your cell phone time and realize that you have just wasted the last 4 hours that you had wanted to dedicate to that 10 page essay, to Facebook.
Does this sound familiar to anyone? Any capitalistic thinker would be appalled at your behaviour because as a general rule, technology was developed to save time and make things more efficient. All technologies are supposedly created with a social group and value in mind. The social group Facebook was originally targeted towards was college students who were to be able to save time by joining this online social networking site where they could easily collaborate with other students and make friends faster. This seems like an oxymoron considering all the time that is wasted by student use of Facebook.
This in itself is an excellent demonstration of the interpretive flexibility of technologies – what was meant to save time, has been transformed into something we use to waste time. It just goes to show you what big procrastinators college students are – what was created for the specific purpose of saving time, has been transformed into the ultimate antagonist of productivity.

Black-boxing Facebook

According to my notes from Communications 253, technology falls into two “predominant cultural orientations” in regards to understanding what technology is and how it affects us. The first theory is that of instrumentalism, where technology consists of value neutral tools and we can control which path it takes both good and bad. The second theory is that of determinism where technology is an independent force that shapes our destiny. If you were to step back and look at Facebook, which category would you say that it would fit in?
Well, both my notes and my common sense tell me that it probably fits into both. Facebook started out as a website designed to help students get to know each other in Harvard University. If we are looking at it from an instrumentalism point of view, it is evident that people have seized the opportunity that was presented to them with the creation of Facebook to expand their social networks to include not only those in their immediate environment, but also people across the globe.
On the other hand, if we are looking at Facebook from a deterministic point of view, perhaps what we do really is determined by technologies. Facebook has become such an integral part of socializing that it seems difficult to function without it. Without Facebook, many people would not be up to date with events, would have difficulty connecting with new people they meet, be unable to collaborate as effectively on group projects… But does this mean that we are merely recipients to Facebook technology and are merely adjusting our behaviour to follow trends?
I think that we as a society chose to capitalize on opportunities presented to us by new technologies, and by those conscious choices, create technologies that determine the nature of society (which now just happens to include several hours per day spent on Facebook).

Invite your friends!

Yay for free Facebook!
Some computer illiterate people like me wonder how on earth Facebook can stay open and cater to all these people around the world without charging a cent. Any business savvy person can tell you that corporate businesses have no interest in giving out information for free when it can be charged for. Facebook is actually earning money from us in two ways (that I am aware of there could be more); they are gathering information about us such as age, gender, sexual preferences, jobs, hobbies, and attended high schools and selling this information to advertising companies to utilize when considering the demographics for their advertisements. Next Facebook uses this information about us (ex. hobbies) and advertises right back at us about things that it thinks will be most relevant and interesting to us. Any of the ads we find interesting and click on instantly earns Facebook more money from the advertising companies! I feel kind of used don’t you? But why stop there? There are 6.6 billion people on this planet and only over 50 million as of November 2007 on Facebook. Facebook actually gets its users to advertise for itself through the tantalizing idea of being able to connect with people that don’t have Facebook. You invite your friends to use Facebook, which they then add and provide their information, which then allows the site to earn more money off of them. This is a classic example of corporate interests problematizing the notion of the Internet as a free public space it was designed to be.

Nicole is feeling status quo…

I was watching this documentary in my English class called Growing Up Online, and one of the parents in the film made a comment on how teens today are much more comfortable displaying private information to the public - especially online. One of the commentators speculated that this blurring of private and public life was occurring because of internet and computer use. Computers are something that we use in the privacy of our own homes however many people are now using the computer to explore the public space of the internet– basically being public and social in the privacy and isolation of your own home.

This blurring of private and public self expressions are evident in simple things such as people’s status on Facebook or their screen names on msn. Things people would never dream of telling other people face-to-face are instead posted on Facebook and other social networking applications for the world to see. Most people would answer the question “How are you today?” with an “I’m fine”, “I’m good”, “Not bad” and so on and so forth. It is a social norm and expectation that even if you are having a bad day, you don’t admit it to others unless they are your close friends. However on Facebook, these social boundaries seem to have been dissolved, and some people are not in the least bit hesitant to share their feelings (no matter how private) with the world.

I decided to take some status updates off of my Facebook news feed, and msn screen names to illustrate my point.

Some people decide to display their emotions on their proverbial sleeves:

• Jon is currently looking for a song lyric that cleverly disguises how he actually feels.
• Kate is wanting it all back
• Ashley shouldn't be so complicated, just touch me and then, just touch me again.
• Sarah is tasting the air you're breathing in.
  

Others insist on telling the world what they are doing every moment of the day:

• May is off to the Blarney Stone for an epic night.
• Janie is off to Van tomorrow morning bright and early...come to Capp College at 1pm to watch the girls play and/or 3pm to hanggggg.
• Tara really wants to put her pics up but can't find the connector.
  

Still others insist on displaying their inner emotions through song lyrics or witty one-liners on their msn display names:

• I sold my soul to Starbucks and all I got was this green apron
• life after death is as improbable as sex after marriage
• doesn’t really matter in this life we’re all the same – don’t worry I’m going to join you
• breathe so I can lock your breath away
• "Please stay, don't go away, the hardest thing is letting go of you..."
  
• no one cares. I learned that a while ago, and I accept it now.
  

It is pretty obvious that these teens don’t really grasp the concept that inside thoughts were meant to be kept inside. Or perhaps that was an old way of thinking, and this new public way of life is the trend brought to us by the post modernist views of the computer and Internet. Perhaps these changes brought to us by the revolutionary internet are causing us to change the definitions of the world around us. Maybe for the next generation, public and private lives will be defined much differently.

I spy with my little eye…

Surveillance can defined as the process of monitoring the behavior of people or processes within organized systems. This is to ensure people conform to the expected or desired norms for security or social control. The Panopticon or the “All Seeing Eye” was a famous form of surveillance designed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of this design was to allow the guard to watch over the prisoners while the prisoners were not able to know whether they were being watched or not. This omnipresent sense of constantly being watched caused the prisoners to internalize that process of control exerted by the guards and thereby motivating them to behave themselves.
What does my topic of Facebook have to do with surveillance? Oh you’d be surprised. The day I realized that I should be careful of what I post on Facebook and the people I allow to be my friends went something like this…

Wakes up extremely hung over from partying all night looks at the clock and firmly resolves that 9:15 is a far too un-godly hour to have to be at work. Calls manager claiming to have eaten something bad the night before and couldn’t make it in to work.
Me being naïve had added my manager as a “Facebook friend” when the friend request came up. Little did I know that it would be her way of keeping an eye on her employees.

Next day at work…
Manager: Hey Nicole Feeling Better?
Me: Much thank you.
Manager: You had quite the night on Friday didn’t you?
Me: What do you mean? (Feigns innocence of course)
Manager: Those were quite the pictures of you partying with your friends. Who was that boy you were sitting on? He doesn’t look like your boyfriend.

Oh snap.
This is the moment I realized how valuable privacy blocks could be, and how easily people could monitor your behavior over things like Facebook. We put pictures up of ourselves doing amazingly stupid and potentially illegal things – how many of you readers can say that they have pictures of yourself drinking in public and completely smashed with friends, or even smoking a hookah? The last one still amazes me considering the consumption of illegal drugs is well, illegal, yet we post it on Facebook for the world to see.
During my high school years, some teachers even went as far as to suspend some students on the basis of finding drunken photos of teeny boppers or “I hate (insert teacher’s name here)” groups. I also read an article that workplaces and schools screen potential applicants via Facebook to see what kind of potential employees/students they would be.
What we expect to be private domains that only our friends can see and laugh at, is really an open arena for the world to gape into from all sides. So next time you want to post those “hilarious frat party photos”, stop and think about who just might be watching you.