Facebook Analysis

The questions posted on the assignment are important things to consider, but from my personal perspective, I feel that it's much more complicated. Each person has a variety of ways to express their identity on FaceBook. They can also control which groups of people can see what. It also depends on how savvy each person is with FB and with the changes that FB makes over time. From my own FB experience, I shall give my general analysis and then take a look at some examples.

Unlike the old Myspace, there is no top friends list unless one choses to use an application to designate the ranking of important people in their lives. Although it is not a very prominent thing on FB. I think that most prominent factors are: status updates, number of friends, comments, pictures, information/about me page, events, as well as pages/groups.

When it comes to commenting, it is evident how savvy a person is with FB if they choose to reply to a post by making another post on the person's wall, or to comment on the post itself. This drives the audience to follow the conversation on one wall only. This way, a person's private profile can control who sees the thread of comments on that post. Instead of having the other person's friends follow the thread, only people who are friends with them can see it.

Generally, more friends, comments, and pictures show a sign of popularity... as well as extreme boredom or having no life outside of the computer. Pictures on the other hand are a way to show off either one's vanity or one's fun life.

The About Me/Info page can have as much or as little information about oneself as one wishes. Groups and fan pages as well show their activism and interests. Relationship statuses is also a part of the Info, but it's quite a complicated subject for a short blog post (I might discuss it later if someone else does not beat me to it).

Some people are more conscientious about their profile than others. There are a number of my friends who rarely ever goes on and/or can care less about who sees what or to put much effort into customizing their FB. Some go one to play games, take random quizzes, or play around with applications and invite friends to also participate. I've also seen friends who claim to be "Married" to each other when in reality they are not, I can't quite put the words as to why but it's just something that's amusing and shows how close/good friends they are. Friends who are into music like to occasionally post youtube videos as well.

I shall pick 3 examples to elaborate on my next post.

FACEBOOK

Friend 1:

Her status is updated on average about 4-5 times per week. Her friends are people from high school and from college. The groups she has joined are mainly general interests, favorite food(groups) and just random interests. Her profile picture is of her laying on the grass with her arms spread and a large puffy long down jacket on. She is portrayed as funny, cool, and simple. It portrays her “real world self” well.

Friend 2:

His status is updated about twice a day, but not consistent. His friends are also high school and college friends, along with a few family members. His groups range from political groups to “how a GIRL wants it.” A lot of them seem like groups that would make him seem cooler in some peoples eyes. His profile pic is of him and a friend in a bar with sombreros on. This pictures suggests that he likes to party and go out. He does not take quizzes or surveys.

Friend 3:

His status is updated about 3 times a week. His friends are also people from high school and college. He’s in 22 groups that represent favorite TV shows, interests, and favorite online videos. His profile pic is of him snowboarding without a shirt on. He doesn’t seem to participate in quizzes or games really. This person has many pictures of social occasions such as in bars, at parties.

Facebook analysis assignment

Choose 3 of your "friends" facebook pages and for each, analyze how that person is performing their identity via their facebook page.

Consider the following questions and write up your observations for each profile as your blog post for this week:

How frequent and timely are their status updates?
Who or what are their friends?
What groups are the in?
What their profile pics like? (what are they of and if they are of the person how are they portrayed?)
What quizzes and other "games" participate in and post the results of?

For those of you who were not here, the point of this assignment is to get outside our normal way of looking at Facebook and to test out some of the ideas set forth in the reading about identity performance online.

digital media and young people

Here are some questions to discuss on Wednesday.

Digital Youth White Paper

1. What were the two main research questions?

2. How was the research conducted?

3. Discuss the 3 genres of participation:
Hanging out
Messing around
Geeking out

4. And the 3 other foci:
networked publics
peer-based learning
new media literacy


Why do youth (heart) social networks?

1. Why do they?

2. What are networked publics?

3. What are the 4 properties not typically present in face-to-face public life?

4. What is impression management?

5. What can we know by studying facebook and myspace profiles?

Software Pirating

Music and videos aren't the only illegal files shared over the internet. People are also downloading thousands of dollars worth of software everyday. When I think of software being pirated, I immediately think of the company Adobe. Since we are this class, we are all somehow connected to Digital Media Studies. And that means, that a lot of us need Adobe software to work on assignments for certain classes (unless you want to go to the computer lab every time). So, I looked into getting Adobe are realized just how much each program is, but after some discussion with classmates, I found out there's ways around paying for the software.
This article really points out how many people illegally download Adobe software off the internet. It showed that 60% of Photoshop users pirated the software! This is definitely an issue Adobe should be concerned about. I mean the price for Adobe Photoshop is $700! So we're not talking about stealing a song you can buy for 99 cents, but rather stealing software that cost a lot of money. I know the entire Adobe packages are accesesable and those cost around $2400. This is serious money we are talking about...

FTC New Blog Guidlines

The Federal Trade Commission set in new guidelines for bloggers to disclose what companies gives them free merchandise or pay them to review their products to make sure that they aren't just reviewing things that they are getting paid for or free products to get a good review. This brings up a whole bunch of discussion not only timing of the guidelines since bloggers have been getting more traffic but also if there should be the same guidelines for other people who aren't bloggers.

Teens and MySpace

While I was reading the chapter on the role of social networking sites for teens, and after the movie on Wednesday, I remembered a video a friend of mine showed me a few weeks ago. It's hilarious because it's pretty cliche. The typical 17-year-old girl that thinks she's independent, but went out and met a stranger on MySpace, then didn't expect to get in trouble for it. Then to top it off, her brother is recording it to post on the Internet.

Other than it being really funny, I think it does a good job of showing how important of a role MySpace played in her life. She thought it was the end of the world.

Sister Busted by Brother This girl goes to meet some guy she on MySpace and comes home late and gets chewed out by her mother. The most amusing part of this clip is how her brother is going on in the background. His comments cracked me up.