By Stephanie Reid
As an avid participant in social
media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr, I can keep up with
news from my friends as well as being able to keep up with the
Kardashians.
Different forms of social media
enable the user to interact differently with the other users: While Facebook is
more social with friends (or stalking), Twitter is a space where
you are able to stalk the latest celebrities and gain access to really cool photos from NASA.
Tuan outlines concepts of space
and place within networks of the social kind. Tuan emphasises the fact that a
space is large and comes with freedoms, whereas a place is familiar:
"Place is security, space is freedom" (Tuan, 1997). Facebook
for me is a place where I share my thoughts and photos with friends, where the people you have on there are familiar.
The other forms of social media are a bit more of an open space run
by celebrities, where the more followers you have correlates with how influential you are.
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| Retrieved from: No more LOLs: 50% of Facebook users prefer 'haha' |
Facebook is a place which enables
the users to interact on a more personal level with their friends and family –
personal anecdotes come through the posts more so than on a Tweet. People generally use ‘text talk’ and
emojis (Thanks Guardian for this weird article on something we don't need to know: No More Lols: 50% of Facebook users prefer 'haha'). A Facebook profile is a variation of a journal (McNeill,
2003), not necessarily in-depth but it commonly discusses the day’s or current
events. This online space is a public place, where we can alter the generalness
of the social media site and personalise it with our own ‘honest’ thoughts (Van Luyn, 2015), similar to a diary.
But have these very public social media sites actually
changed our perception of a journal, making these spaces somewhere that we can
transform into our place? Or is it just a place for celebrities with influence?
References:
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
McNeill, L. (2003). Teaching an old genre new tricks: The
diary on the Internet.Biography, 12, 313
Tuan, Y.
(1977). Space and place (p. 3). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Parkinson, H. (2015). No more LOLs: 50% of Facebook users prefer 'haha'. The Guardian. Retrieved 13 August 2015, from http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/10/lol-facebook-haha
Image Credits:
Parkinson, H. (2015). Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/10/lol-facebook-haha
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ReplyDeleteAs a user of all the social media sites that you have mentioned, I definitely agree that each platform enables a different user interaction. Your interpretation of the Tuan reading was that the reading highlighted the difference between space and place in a way that could be applied to a social media context. “Place is security, space is freedom” (Tuan, 1997) was a good quote to demonstrate this, and I agree that Facebook is a place that is based on comfort and familiarity. My interpretation of space was also aligned with your interpretation, with it having lower levels of comfortably, less control, and certainly less influence. Although to an extent I agree with labeling Facebook as a variation of a journal (McNeill, 2003), I believe that through its dominance in the world of communication it deserves to be its own genre as it has contributed much more than its predecessors. To answer your closing question, I do believe that the social media sites have changed our perception of a journal, to the extent that it is evolving into its own genre.
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