This satire on our new social influences, exaggerates and adds a comic affect to how we use Facebook. Facebook is an extension of ourselves, and how we connect with people. This new platform lets us manipulate the information by privacy settings, who we are friends with, what groups and events we join. When we share and publish our lives, we do not think this as taking away our privacy. I am not saying that Facebook is a bad thing! Without this useful tool, how would people stay in touch and converse quickly without borders?
The only negative effect is the result it has on our perceptions on the world and how we see things. If our friends upload pictures from a party, everyone who is a "mutual friend" can see what you have done, and can make assumptions on the lack of substantive information given. This whole concept is hard to grasp without knowing the truth behind the medium. We have to understand that our Internet life is very public, and that it can be a useful tool if we use it to learn and connect, rather then convey our individualistic image. Think about this when you log onto your Facebook account and are bombarded with images and information from other peoples' lives. It can be hard to decipher what is relevant to your life, if you can opt-out of certain things you are exposed to.
We live in the era of convergence culture, which is act of converging aka "coming closer." Everything is connected, especially with our database way of receiving information. Everything on the Internet can be found and put under a data source, so it can be located.
“Social networking profiles push the networking practice to the forefront by placing more prominence on friends than the text being produced...the overriding point of the networking profile is to reach out and sustain a network through the maintenance of links.” (New Media, Networking, and Phatic Culture, Vincent Miller, pg. 390)
Phatic: In linguistics, a phatic expression is one whose only function is to perform a social task, as opposed to conveying information. The term was coined by anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski in the early 1900s.
