Lacey Erickson

The course entitled, “Social Implications of an Information Society” has highlighted the key ideas of our cultures converging with the emphasis on the technologies that have brought what our culture is today. With this elaborate title, I would like to first define what exactly is meant by social implications and of course an information society. Social Implications would be how we interact with each other, how we participate in the information society, the relationships we may before because of this new culture, and how we converge our media and technologies to better prepare ourselves and to be efficient. If we define our information society we can look at it as how our culture has come about. We now are living in a culture of consumerism. We are constantly being driven by social status, social norms, and media to consume as much information and products as possible. Information society is the public and people or consumers within the public have different degrees of involvement. The more the involvement with participatory media or the information given to you the more of an affect it will have on the implications. It key to remember that the media plays a vital role in targeting certain people for certain ideas and products. Demographics can affect the way a message is portrayed and where it is seen. Now that we have an understanding of social implications of an information society let’s apply it to a media artifact.

It’s that blue and white site that sometimes draws people to log on to even before their email - Facebook is becoming more and more popular everyday. On October 28, 2003 a started website of Facebook called Facemash and was changed to the popular name on February 4, 2004. Now, Facebook recorded that their 35-54 year old demographic segment not only continued to grow the fastest, but it accelerated to a 276.4% growth rate over the past 6 months. That demographic is doubling roughly every two months. Facebook has over 300 million users spread over 180 countries. This gives the credibility to Facebook for being a part of our global convergence and susceptible to the critique and breakdown of the social implication of Facebook and how it is related to our information society. We have read many scholarly theories and concepts this past semester and in this paper I plan to apply some of the ideas from Jan Nederveen Pieterse to explain social implications, how Facebook reveals about the theory, how the theory helps to describe the social implications.

With 300 million users it’s no surprise the implications of the site have affected many people and areas. Facebook as a social networking site keeps friends from all over connected. Many friendships are rekindled with the help of Facebook. Photos are able to be uploaded to the site allowing whomever is your friend to look at it. There is also certain features of the site that allows you to control who sees your profile, and who sees your pictures. You can limit your profile to certain information to certain people. It allows you to use the site and still feel safe and secure. There is also a way to have certain pages targeted to specific groups and networks. You can create a page for your religion, beliefs, your favorite singer, sports team, or even issues that are affecting society. It’s a way that you can not only advertise your ideas or beliefs, but find people that may have the same ideas as you. Facebook is a way to get connected and keep people engaging in the participatory media that has changed our culture. Now that there is a way to keep not only friends connected, but also groups and people who share the same beliefs and ideas, why not start advertising? Facebook has created a world where people are displaying their personalities, their favorites, their beliefs, ultimately who they are. This makes it very easy for people or companies to target their demographics. Profiles on Facebook are cutting out the research for the advertiser to find where their target audience is. No need when everything is stated on one page.

Facebook allows people to get connected, but all of this accessibility and efficiency of information could relay some implications that may be negative. More than one-quarter (26.9 percent) of the employers reported that they have Googled candidates or reviewed job applicant profiles on social networking sites. If the potential employer asks the candidate in the job interview about their Facebook profile, chances are they probably aren’t prepared to answer certain questions about their personal life, but here they are displaying all the personal information on the internet. According to an article from MSNBC.com, “Social networking sites have gained popularity among hiring managers because of their convenience and a growing anxiety about hiring the right people.” Employers aren’t the only ones looking at Facebook. Just last month a report about a Canadian woman on sick leave for depression would fight an insurance company's decision to cut her benefits after her agent found photos on Facebook of her vacationing, at a bar and at a party. Again, it’s not just a diary or only accessible by your friends it’s a social networking site that is able to be reached by not only by your friends, but whomever can access the internet. Identity theft is also been increased because of face book. Hackers hack into people’s account and pose as the victim. They then explain that they are in need of help financially (usually saying they are stuck in a foreign country or in a life or death situation) and if they could help to wire them money to a Western Union branch. According to a researcher on identity theft accessibility on Facebook, “Most people wouldn’t give this kind of information out to people on the street but their guard sometimes seems to drop in the context of a friend request on the Facebook.” Facebook has created this false world where with the click of a button someone you don’t even know can suddenly become your friend. Users should use precautions, but if they don’t another negative implication of Facebook can come into play. Along with thieves can be stalkers. According to an article entitled, The Anatomy of a Facebook Stalker, “There are a number of methods a stalker can use to keep track of you. Many of these are seemingly innocuous, and yet can give much more access to your information that you know.”Stalkers tend to look at your pictures, your Facebook status, and your wall posts. On top of these specific implications of Facebook, there is one large one that explains a lot about what Facebook means for our culture. Facebook has indeed kept people in contact, but the face to face contact has become more and more scarce throughout the years.

To understand how Facebook has become an affective medium we first need to look at it in a broad view. Facebook is a social networking site that is logged on to through the internet. The internet has been described as the perfect medium to converge information and ideas all around the globe. Globalization according to a historic definition is a long term historical process of growing worldwide interconnectedness. Internet helped pave the way for a fast and efficient way to converge cultures from all over the world. Globalization also involves a trend towards human integration with the converging of ideas comes the communication with the people that surround and relay the information or ideas. Facebook is a vehicle for globalization and human integration to occur. It allows people from all over the world to share ideas.

To describe how this globalization has affected our culture I would like to apply the ideas of Weber on McDonaldization. According to Nederveen Pieterse, “There is a widespread understanding that growing global interconnectedness leads toward increasing cultural standardization and uniformization as in the global sweep of consumerism. Facebook can be seen as a commodity but more so a commodity of a participatory medium. McDonalization, according to Ritzer is “the process whereby the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world.” There are five main components of McDonalization; they are efficiency, calculability, predictability, control, and irrationality of rationality. First off efficiency is the effort to discover the best possible means to whatever end is desired. Workers in a fast-food restaurant burgers are assembled in a assembly line fashion so that they get out quickly. The restaurant is even set up for people to quickly eat and leave. Facebook is efficiently set up for us to log on. They even have an icon at the side of the page that pops up some of your friends so you can click on them and interact with them easier and more quickly. There is link to you and your friends back and forth if you write on their wall, and there is even tags in pictures so that you can access their profile with one click. Calculability is the emphasis on quantity of quality. In the McDonald’s view, calculability is described with various aspects of the work at fast-food restaurants is timed. The emphasis on speed over compensates the quality of the work. When users log onto Facebook they are able to access profiles quickly, but the ease causes the time spent on there to be quick. We tend to not have big conversations when we are on their it’s more like a quick message or a writing on the wall. Most of the time it’s just little sayings only the author and the recipient would understand, but there it is for everyone to see. Predictability is when things are pretty much the same from one geographic setting to another and from one time to another. In fast-food restaurants employees are to look the same and perform their job in the same ways. When you order a Big-Mac at one restaurant you should predict and expect the same thing at another. Facebook is predictable. When you log on you see the same thing every time. It always logs into your Facebook profile, and the layout of the website is the same throughout. Besides different languages Facebook still has the same colors, links and applications in every country. It’s predictable, even on a global level. Control is described as the domination of technologies over employees and customers. In fast-food restaurants they have machines that take over certain labors that a person could perform easily, but it goes hand in hand with predictability, efficiency and calculability. There are French fry machines that buzz and lift up when they are finished, and you can fill up a cup with pop by pushing a button and you don’t even have to hold it there. Control related to Facebook has to do with the idea of Facebook itself. Facebook is a technology that allows us to communicate with people without seeing them. We don’t have to sit and have a long conversation if we don’t want to it’s there if we want to say one word to someone or a whole conversation. We don’t even have to respond back if we don’t want to and it’s not considered rude if you don’t. The irrationality of rationality is the reality that rationality seems to often lead to its exact opposite irrationality. In a fast-food restaurant the effeminacy of the fast-food is often replaced with the inefficiency of long lines. Facebook is suppose to keep people connected, but with the ease and normality of just talking to a person on Facebook it cuts a lot of the communication out.

As you can see there is a distint similarity and understanding of how Facebook has become a mark in our culture as a consumption theory through McDonaldization. It shows that in a capitalist society of consumerism, Facebook is a medium that allows us to consume information efficiently. Facebook is then considered a part of the information society and does have positive and negative implications of it. I think that it is key to understand that the contradiction of the positive and negative affects shows the reality of our convergence. The convergence of cultures can erase barriers between people, but that can cause the falling of cultures and the loss of traditions that our society once stood for.

Du, Wei. (August 14, 2007). Job candidates getting tripped up by Facebook. MSNBC.com. Retrieved Dec 2, 2009.

Easley, Sean. (May 20, 2009). The Anatomy of a Facebook Stalker. Associatedcontent.com. Retrieved Dec. 2, 2009.

Facebook diagnosis affects benefits Depression sufferer fights insurer. (November 24, 2009) St. Paul Pioneer Press. Retrieved Dec 2, 2009

Gray, Kevin. How Will Your Online Profile Affect Potential Job Offers? Jobweb.com. Retrieved December 2, 2009.

Messmer, Ellen. (Aug 14, 2007). Study: Facebook users easy targets for identity theft. MacWorld.com. Retrieved on Dec 2, 2009.

Nederveen Pieterse, Jan. (2009). Globalization & Culture; Second edition. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.