facebook

facebook sucks. 

and i love it. 

i hate it too. 

it sucks me in every time i decide not to use it anymore. 

what do i hate the most? 

in all honesty, what i hate the most is seeing my friends who are no longer my in-person friends and seeing that they are still friends with each other in the real world. it makes me feel lonely. extremely lonely. it reminds me of the friends who have moved on from my life. 

i find it very depressing. 

facebook gives us this false sense of community. it makes you feel connected to all sorts of people whom you would never connect with in the real world. like friends from grade school who you haven't seen in 30 years and wont see in person, but we are facebook friends. 

community is defined in 2 ways:

1. a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristics in common. 

2. a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals. 


but now we have this third type of community, which is a cyber community - made up of people who do not necessarily share attitudes, interests or goals, and they don't live in the same place or necessarily have characteristics in common. so what is it?

community is also defined as:

 a set of interactions, human behaviours that have meaning and expectations between its members. Not just action, but actions based on shared expectations, values, beliefs and meanings between individuals. [...] Although a community is a cultural system (in that it transcends its individual persons) do not assume that a community is a harmonious unity. It isn't. It is full of factions, struggles and conflicts, based upon differences in gender, religion, access to wealth, ethnicity, class, educational level, income, ownership of capital, language and many other factors. http://cec.vcn.bc.ca/cmp/whatcom.htm#Bit

facebook is this strange space in which people share photos of food, videos of cats, stories about their kids, and articles they find on buzzfeed. there is a shared meaning between its members, and shared expectations which fits the broader meaning of community. 

there is something exciting about your status being "liked" and something disappointing when your status doesn't get any "likes". 

today my facebook feed consists of 3 back to school articles, an article about vitamin D and preventing cancer, 7 photos of cats, 12 videos of the ice bucket challenge for ALS, 4 photos of puns, 2 status updates about children, and 3 photos of the baseball game. 

what does this say about my cyber community? what does this say about my interests, my goals, my aspirations? what does it say about me? 

then there are the status updates that show me how much more fun everyone else seems to be having than me. followed by another photo of a cat. or food. 

and the truth is, as much as i hate facebook, i also love it and am obsessed with looking at my newsfeed and "liking" things. i love seeing photos of peoples children. i love seeing what old friends are up to. i could do with less cats. just saying. 

what are your thoughts on facebook?

be kind to yourself, 

xoxo

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