Face to Face(book)

By Aydan Johnstone

Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr are social networks that have been dominating the world of communication over the past decade. Facebook, a social network that allows user interaction through messaging, status updates, and sharing of digital media, is at the forefront of this evolution with 1.44 billion active monthly users. 

The concept of space and place is explored by Tuan with a focus on culture and social experience. Tuan (1997) proposed that “space and place are basic components of the lived world” which is a great explanation of why Facebook is a place that makes me feel secure. Through interaction on this social network I am able to experience basic components of the lived world online. This is a dramatic shift in interaction that made me notice that social experience has transformed from: face-to-face interactions to face-to-facebook interactions. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing as spaces and places can be both online and offline (Van Luyn, 2015).

Image Retrieved: HYPEBEAST

Facebook is an evolved journal that is similar to the original format of a journal, but with slight differences (McNeill, 2003). The language used on Facebook is quite different than the format of a traditional journal, with ‘slang’ and ‘emojis’ having a unique social media presence. Although we incorporate these adopted language forms into our online vocabulary almost religiously, Facebook is quite aware of the fact that we love to use certain ‘slang’ or ‘emojis’. A recent data survey by the Facebook research team discovered that e-laughter is a dialect that is itself evolving: Facebook is Tracking How You Laugh in Messages The survey also stated that the use of ‘hehe’, ‘haha, ‘lol’, or a specific emoji actually reveals more about your age, gender and location than you would like to think. This fascinated me that through a specific type of communication, e-laughter, place and space are able to be connected through common use of words.

Facebook has pioneered social networking and communication over the past decade and has connected space and place like we could have never imagined. Is it concerning that social interactions have changed from face-to-face to face-to-facebook? 

References:

McNeill, L. (2009). Diary 2.0? A Genre Moves from Page to Screen. Language and New Media: Linguistic, Cultural, and Technological Evolutions. USA: Hampton Press Inc.

Tuan, Y. (1977). Space and place (p. 3). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Van Luyn, A. (2015). BA1002: Space: Networks, Narratives, and the Making of Place, Lecture 3: Space and Identity: Genre and Transformation. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au

Weinsberg, U.; Adamic, L.; Devlin, M. (2015). The not-so-universal language of data'. Facebook Research. Retrieved 14 August 2015, from https://research.facebook.com/blog/1605690073053884/the-not-so-universal-language-of-laughter/#fn1

Image Reference

Yeung, G. (2015). Retrieved from: http://hypebeast.com/2015/8/facebook-is-tracking-how-you-laugh-in-messages