From my cabinet of curiosities, I picked to analyse a very popular social networking website - Facebook. The reason behind my choice is the huge audience and consumption of the site. Facebook statistics show that there are more than 300 million active users, 50% of which log on in any given day and 8 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day worldwide. So I presumed it will be a pretty good subject of analysis.
1. In what ways could your media object ‘influence’ the minds of a vulnerable audience?
- Since last week we were constantly reminded that when thinking of the audience, we're not supposed to imagine a group of people "out there" but start with the "I" and analyse, I will base the answer to that question to my personal childhood experience. When I was growing up, there was no Facebook (it was found in 2004), but there was another way of socialising through the internet and that was mIRC. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it is an "Internet Relay Chat client", pretty much the most popular shareware IRC chat client for Windows. What is it is a program where you connect to a server and enter a channel (like, for instance, #Coventry) and you are able to socialise with everyone who has entered the same channel - all messages would be read by everyone, unless you write them on a private chat. Open, more open even than Facebook, where only your friends can read what you write, whereas in mIRC everyone had that possibility.
mIRC was introduced to me when I was perhaps 13 years old. My older sister and my cousin were spending all day every day in that chat client, leaving me and my younger sister eager for playing (the 4 of us always played together, when we were younger). What this resulted in, was my total disinterest in mIRC, later to lead me refusing to use it for a very long time. I didn't understand it at the time, as I suppose children don't understand Facebook now, and I was completely put off by the fact that my friends were spending so much time on it, that they had absolutely no time left for me (as I'm sure children feel towards Facebook).
It wasn't the media object itself that influenced me and made me refuse using it, it was the response it received from society. And based on how much I wasn't interested in using it, it was even more annoying that everyone else was. The parallel with Facebook is obvious - everyone is on Facebook and everyone who is not, is annoyed that everyone else is. Anyway, as I said, this mainly resulted in my refusal to use it for maybe 4 years after that, only because I was left with the impression that it was uninteresting and time-consuming and a person could very well use their time in a much better way.
2. What possible negative ‘effect’ does this media object have on the audience and society?
- I personally love Facebook, I can't imagine living without it. It is the only way I can keep in touch with all of my 200 friends from different countries and places I've been, without having to write letters to all of them, asking them where they've been and could they send me photos. It is all there. However, just like mIRC, I believe that the negative effect on society is that everyone becomes so anti-social, due to the existence of all these online networking systems. We prefer sitting at home and chatting with someone or browsing through their pictures, instead of going out sometimes. We prefer talking on Facebook, rather than on the phone or face-face. As with pretty much everything computer-mediated, the negative side is the loss of the personal relationship and connection.
Another negative effect, something that recently became a story, is that we believe the person on the other side is real and it is the person they present, because we are the same person we present. And that might lead to some bad consequences. If we try to become a real-life friend to a Facebook friend or at the least meet them in person, the least that could happen is we could realise that is not the same person and that might lead to us losing our online friendship (it happened to me once with a "mIRC friend" of mine). The worst that could happen is that there are a lot of dangerous people online and someone might turn out to be a criminal and actually hurt us.
Which brings me again to the first question, if I think about how the vulnerable audience, unaware of the dangers of online networking, might be dragged into something dangerous and life-threatening, when using a website like Facebook without completely understanding it.
Overall, I believe a website such as Facebook has a lot more positive qualities than negative and its only danger to the vulnerable audience is the unawareness of how impersonal and deceitful an online social networking website might be.Labels: tasks |
