Emmajayne1987’s Weblog

What exactly is the purpose of Facebook? It is defined as a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. (Taken from Facebook – about Facebook, accessed 10/01/2008) But do any of it’s users become members in order to keep in touch with new friends or to get back in touch with olds friends, or do they become members because it is another way for people to be who they want to be? You can write absolutely anything on your Facebook profile, so what’s to stop people from telling a few white lies to make themselves look better. That’s when you start getting involved with the quizzes and questionnaires to discover what you would be called if you were a gangster or a drag queen, or you can even be a type of sports car by answering a few questions. In the words of the Facebook team “the possibilities are endless”. 

 The main reason I went on to join Facebook was because the majority of my friends were on there and I kept getting reminders via email that I was behind the times and needed to set myself up with a profile so I could join my friends and become addicted myself. However the first time I ever heard of Facebook was when a friend told it was a website where you get your photo viewed by others (most of whom you will not know) and they determine whether you are “hot or not”. There is an application like this Facebook but that was not what it was solely about, yet that was why many people used it.  

“Facebook is announcing that it has hit 30 million active users today. Unlike MySpace, Facebook doesn’t pad its numbers with dead accounts: these people log in at least once a month. As you can see by extending the graph below, the number of active users has doubled since the start of the year.”

The Facebook team contradict themselves by saying that the purpose of the site is for people to keep in touch with those they know or used to know, yet they state that it can be a way to learn things about the new people you meet as a Facebook member.  How many people on Facebook have got friends they have never even met or heard of before? I would say a lot, as there are so many of my friends who have up to 300 people as friends on their profile. I have 77, but these are people I actually know and have talked to in person during my life.  Research has suggested that having too many friends on sites like Facebook and MySpace makes that person look insecure; they have been branded “Facebook whales” and name used for those with over 800 friends on their profile. The use of Facebook has grown rapidly over the years, and the number of hits it has received has double since 2004.  The above graph shows how much the use of Facebook has grown over the years. (Obtained from http://mashable.com/2007/07/10/facebook-users-2/, accessed 10/01/2008)

Now that Facebook has become a household name and now that so many people are using it, it starts to become addictive, and a major source of time wasting. People who wish to go online to send comments or messages to their friends are now forever confronted by the many new applications created by either the Facebook team or users of the site. What started as a swift check of messages and quick hello to friends now turns into a quest to beat your friends on PacMan and movie quizzes. Facebook has become one of the most addictive time wasters, and no longer seems to have a definate purpose.  

Souces used:

http://mashable.com/2007/07/10/facebook-users-2/

http://yorksj.facebook.com/about.php

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/12/18/facebook_whales_800_is_too_many_friends.html

Many people think the weblog is just an online diary for it’s user to talk about themselves and their lives and emotions, and for the first few months of my blog on Myspace that was all I did too. But just how powerful can a blog be when used in the right way to send a message into the world? Ultimately it can be another form of journalism or a source of hope for some members of society. I recently read about the teenage boy Jack (his name has been changed to protect his identity) who wrote in his blog about how he had come out as gay to his parents and how they wanted to send him off to a Christian “straight camp” to get him back on the right track. He responded by writing a personal diary, in the form of a blog on his Myspace page and it was seen by all of his friends and later circulated to gay and lesbian activists who felt compelled to protest the decision made by Jack’s parents outside the camps headquarters. It was soon in the news as so many people had passed on the blog in hope that they would get more support. In this case the blog is very powerful in a sense that a lot of people had their eyes opened to what life was like for a teenager to have to face the difficulty of telling his parents he was gay and getting that kind of reaction.

(Taken from http://www.brandonblog.com/ARCHIVES_2.html )

Many people believe that the blog is a form of new media that cannot be altered by the mainstream media to support what they are saying in the newspapers and on the news. For example, the soldiers on the front line in Iraq have the opportunity to write in their blogs about how they feel, and they use this as form of reporting the real news.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/may/05/news.usnews  

What we see and hear and read in the media is not always the full story, we only see what the government wants us to see as ultimately it is the government who control the media. It is because of this that there have been tighter restrictions about what a soldier can now write in his blog, as what we may find newsworthy may not be seen as appropriate by authorities for us to see.

“There were different people to meet each day. There were some who would kill you if they could. They would look at you and you could see the hate in their eyes. I also met with people who would have given me everything they owned. People, that were so thankful to us because we had rid them of Saddam.”(Part of a blog by Sgt Zachary Scott-Singley on 4/05/2005, accessed on 8/01/2008)

With these blogs from the soldiers in Iraq we get to learn the real news, news that has not been edited or tampered with by those who do not want us to know the truth about the conditions in Iraq.

Soldiers out on the front line want us to know what they are going through without it being censored or edited to protect us from the real horror of life in Iraq and Afghanistan.  

“The thoughts as of late are like mini clips from a movie. The images of smashing a door down and seeing the utter terror on peoples faces. The one Marine interpreter and the look on his face with an entry wound to the cheek and this massive exit wound to the back of head.” (Taken from American Soldier blog written on 11/1/2007, accessed 10/01/2008)

 The blogs we read from the front line are like little snippets of what everyday life is like for these poor soldiers, and although we are told if a soldier dies and we a given the facts about how many we have lost out there, we will never fully grasp the reality of the war for these men. This is why these blogs are so powerful, as they help people like us and many others back home understand the severity of the war and why they need to be out there. It was often said that World War 1 was the first war on radio, Vietnam was the first war on television and now it seems the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars will be the first to be blogged.

Blogs have begun to represent a threat to mainstream media in a number of ways. As the fast expansion of the digital world led to a decline of audience share for analogue and old broadcast networks, so too can we expect a rapid decline in use of preweb media. We have access to the news on the internet whether it is through blogs created by reporters, or online newspapers. However mainstream media attack back at the blogs, claiming that they were insignificant, filled with errors and lacking in credibility, but soon came to find that it was prudent to take the “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach and created online newspapers and what we once called columns of an online newspapers are now called blogs.

Sources used:

Tremayne, M. Blogging, Citizenship and the Future of Media. Introduction: Examining the Blog-Media Relationship

http://blogs.salon.com/0002967/2005/05/10.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4555590.stm

http://www.soldierlife.com/category/general/page/2/

http://www.brandonblog.com/ARCHIVES_2.html

The media is just one those things in life that you either love or you hate, probably both on more that one occasion. We need it in order to know about world issues, or to vent our anger out in the form of a blog, or to research important documents on the internet. But we still loathe the effect it can have on the society we live in today, one of the more serious effects being violence. And this is not petty domestic fights about whether to watch Big Brother or Top Gear tonight that I’m talking about, but the violence we see on phone cameras posted on the internet because the owner of the phone thought it would be funny to attack an individual in the street and record it. And what does the youth of today do as a response to this idiot? They laugh.

There has been an alarming increase in cases of attacks being recorded on mobile phones for fun, a craze now known as “happy slapping” and the media frenzy on this issue is only making it worse. The more people hear about this new form of entertainment for disturbed individuals, the bigger the craze will get and then we will see more brutal attacks, even murders being recorded.

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/mobile/article/0,2763,1470214,00.html  

According to this article from the Guardian website, the new fad started off as a craze on the UK garage music scene before catching on through school playgrounds throughout London, and is now a nationwide phenomenon. The report from the Guardian states that as the craze spreads towards the north of England the attacks become more menacing and involve more adult victims, as there has been a longer period of time for the attackers to adjust to this new way of intimidating people and the more it is reported on the more attention is given to these attackers therefore they will get more ruthless. Even on the internet these happy slappers are promoting the use of ones mobile to record an assault, with a forum member “happyslapper2” describing the fad as a joke and that people should do it when they are bored! It has been shown in the media that it is mainly youths who play the attackers and they are often wearing hooded jackets to conceal their identity, contributing also to the hysteria surrounding “hoodies” and how we as a nation perceive those wearing them.

Sources used: 

www.theguardian.co.uk