My Face

My dear loyal readers we now come to the social networking side of things, the creation of profiles, the neverending status updates, the use of your information for marketing and the overarching human desire for gratification and acknowledgement.

There is such a wide range of issues and topics I could write for days on this topic but let me begin with the buisness side of things. Certain social networking sites such as Facebook "encourage[s] people to share their personal goals" (Rosen, 2007). This in turn begins a cycle of what is called connected marketing. If you were to join the Mi-Goreng appreciation society group on facebook there is a good chance you will be targeted by cheap food advertisements. But that is the smaller side of the scale. When every user signs up for Facebook they are signing away everything they upload to be the property of Facebook. That includes photographs and everything that is written. There was an instance where a user saw themselves on a billboard advertisement. Their picture had been sold by Facebook to an advertising company.

That is not all. So you sign over your account and you join up to groups, you also put in all your demographic details. These details are then sold for money!

Relationships are also called into question online. Perhaps people are only your Facebook friends so they can stalk you? Spy on you? It is possible to create fake accounts so the deception deepens! And then when we get deeper are your friends actually your friends, or just aqquaintences, or someone you met once at a party? I have all three but only really communicate with those i value most and who will write back to me, feeding my need for acknowledgement, for notifications. I only "interact with those few that matter and that reciprocate my attention," (Huberman, et all., 2008).


I wish I could continue but space is small and time is little! See you next week amigos.


Rosen, C. 2007. Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism. The New Atlantis, 17: 15-31.

Huberman, B.A., Romero D. M. and Wu, F. (2009) Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope. First Monday, Volume 14