No Facebook, no face: the social pressure of Facebook
Even when you aren’t involved in the technical world or aren’t an expert on online social media you will know it, Facebook. It seems like every company, every person and even a pet has a Facebook account nowadays. More and more digital technologies conquer the world in a rapid speed. A lot of companies make a business out of these changes, trying to gain the biggest market share and improve the world. But what are the needs those media fulfill? Is there any need for the customer or is it just a hype substituting another media?
Social networking sites (SNS) are quickly becoming one of the most popular tools for social interaction and information exchange. Hughes concluded that personality was related to online socializing and information seeking/exchange (2012). Facebook filters the displayed information from the more than thirty billion pieces of content that is available every month. According the statistics of Facebook an average user creates ninety pieces of content every month, creating immense data storage (Vanetti, 2010). Without a Facebook account a lot of information, a lot of discussions about actual topics and information about personal events isn’t available. For example, the summaries and important questions and details for your study are posted online in the Facebook group by classmates to discuss and provide each other important information. Without Facebook, you don’t have access to these post and it is more difficult to connect and discuss with classmates. The analysis of the relationship between users’ needs and civic and political participation indicated that informational uses were more correlated to the civic and political action than to recreational uses (Park, 2009). Recreational users are often looking for content of friends and funny videos. The customer is therefore forced to use Facebook to be aware of the things that happen, on social, political and economic base.
How long will it take for everybody has one or more online account at a SNS?
Bibliography
Hughes, D. J., Rowe, M., Batey, M., & Lee, A. (2012). A tale of two sites: Twitter vs. Facebook and the personality predictors of social media usage. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(2), 561-569.
Park, N., Kee, K. F., & Valenzuela, S. (2009). Being immersed in social networking environment: Facebook groups, uses and gratifications, and social outcomes. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 12(6), 729-733.
Vanetti, M., Binaghi, E., Carminati, B., Carullo, M., & Ferrari, E. (2010, September). Content-based filtering in on-line social networks. In International Workshop on Privacy and Security Issues in Data Mining and Machine Learning (pp. 127-140). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
I think your title sums up the way how our world works right now. If you meet someone or when you are going to meet someone, sooner or later you and the other person will look each other’s account up on SNS to connect. And if someone does not have an account there is such a large probability that this person will stay unknown to the environment he or she lives in. I think it’s almost impossible to be a student without a facebook account. Yes, it could be a huge distraction, but all the benefits outweighs the negative sides. A study group on facebook provides summaries, interesting discussion topics for exams, a group for team assignments and study related events. And to think that all these information and data is free to use by Facebook. People post these “ninety pieces of content” every month without realizing that they are actually giving all the information about theirselves to Facebook. And with these study groups, students are actually giving all the information about the institution and study program to Facebook for free.