So after due consideration and mulling over the Facebook question, I decided to venture and get an account with Facebook. Here are my thoughts on Facebook. Viewers’ discretion is highly advised due to its subjective nature. :[
I believe everyone in the class has agreed that Facebook is indeed Multimedia. It has everything multimedia about it, right?
Apart from being a social networking tool, Facebook is a form of digital expression of self. It is highly regarded in comparison to its competition – MySpace. The two have a lot in common but what makes Facebook better than MySpace? For one, you don’t have a bunch of perverts emailing you and sending some obscene pictures of their naked self portrait. You are also bound to limited group of people – colleagues, school mates and not to mention family in the form of past, present and future.
Facebook also is a lot *cleaner* (notice the sarcasm) in terms of its layout and content therein. You are not bombarded with bands that want you to check their once in a lifetime performance that will forever change your perception of music. You can’t change the colour of your page and make it masculine and prettier such as mySpace. Unlike MySpace that is considered to be a webpage for those who can’t afford to have their own website, Facebook is totally ‘elite’ and uniform in terms of its generic layout (how lovely).
Not to trash Facebook entirely, other than being filled with some useless application such as sending iconic gestures ie. gifts and poking your friends, there are features where you could belong to certain groups in my case it will be “The Intro to Psych” group. You could write about anything, post some link, give your thoughts on how mind and behaviour collided in Psychology courses. I still say that this feature is really redundant simply because, this year the Intro to Psych courses have been re-invented and new website pretty much sum it all up. The Facebook group is just another means of getting to the students at Mac. Talking about being redundant, there are so many other websites that offers “photo/video sharing”. If you want to get in touch, hey use the phone or better yet, email!
It is still a tool where you could get in touch with some (SOME) of your friends. It is highly doubtful if I could actually get in touch with my high school classmates. Why is this? Well, it’s geographically challenge, I would say. This product is only applicable to certain countries ie. North America. (Please feel free to add). I would not have an easy time finding a friend that lived in Malaysia about 10years ago who probably had moved to UK. That being said, search capability is limited especially when the town that you lived in and/or the school that you went to is not even listed.
Talking about poking – it’s senseless and pretty dumb. I have a really hard time understanding this feature simply because I don’t get any sensation physically whatsoever. The weird thing is, after a few poking, you sort of laugh and thought, “boy, was that funny!” This reaction is almost baffling – so you don’t get any sensation of any sort but you are still tickled somehow. How fascinating! I then realized that application such as Facebook is what made these "kids" tick. Even lovely, some professors’ are agreeing to this and having to adapt. Is it a question of trend, or is it a question of being pressure to keep up with trend? If it’s really that great, why then wouldn’t educators, teachers use Facebook as a tool in contrast to webct and/or moodle (put moderation purposes aside)?
Lastly, why would I only receive about 2% feedback from the 400 some students in this class?
FYI: Account Page: Deactivate Account.
On a side note; Tobias Schonwetter wrote an interesting-made-me-smile-kinda article on Facebook.
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