By Kirralee Stover
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| Image from: http://www.abovethefoldmag.com/?q=article/power-facebook-promoted-posts |
With so many social networks at our fingertips, is there a sense of power that is impacting our daily lives? Many of us are viewing the world being portrayed through the small devices in our hand. Waking up every morning, the first thing I (and I am sure many others) do is grab my phone and log into Facebook.
I will be analysing Facebook in my blogs over the coming weeks as I have been a member for five years and over this period my outlook on this network has certainly been altered. Facebook is being used as an online diary by many. Facebook gives users the impression of having power through multiple ways. We control who can see or share our posts, we can choose what to post, but the most concerning thought involving power is those obsessed with gaining likes. Some even take it as far as posting and deleting a status that doesn't have many likes or comments. Users then start to change their writing style in order to match that of what others wish to read. In Turkle's reading, the idea of self-surveillance in relation to the panopticon is introduced. "Individuals learn to look at themselves through the eyes of the prison guard" (Turkle, 1995). Some user's attempt to look at what they are posting from an outside perspective, reflecting on whether or not it is something that will attract attention and result in likes.
Why do we do this? Is it a result of Power? Seeing a high number of likes on a post can lead the feeling of happiness and power, especially when noticing your post has more likes than the one below it on your newsfeed. Kuttainen (2015) suggests that power is not able to be distributed equally and this can be seen by scrolling through Facebook and viewing the posts and noticing which ones are more popular by either likes or comments. There are both positive and negative impacts of having a sense of power on Facebook, but is it affecting our day to day life?
References
Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the internet. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Kuttainen, V. (2015). BA1002: Space: Networks, Narratives, and the Making of Place, Lecture 2: Power: The Panopticon. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au
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I can agree with this post and I can definitely relate to some of what you’re saying here. I think most young people will have gotten slightly obsessed with Facebook at some point in their lives and felt real emotion when they didn’t get what they think to be a deserved amount of likes on a photo or post. I’ve been deleting my terrible adolescent posts and photos from Facebook in the last few weeks and feel a slight touch of pride at the old likes (quickly overridden by crippling shame). Still it makes me think maybe Facebook posts may be becoming their own genre of writing like mentioned in the lecture (Van Lyun 2015). It’s a socially based dialogue that definitely does not existing in a vacuum with posts often responding to other seen Facebook posts. And from what I have seen they have their own conventional and highly (well sorta) organised restraints.
ReplyDeleteReferences
Van Luyn, A. (2015). BA1002: Space: Networks, Narratives, and the Making of Place, Lecture 3: Space and Identity: Genre and Transformation. [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au
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