Tales from Facebook
Daniel Miller
Language: English
Pages: 220
ISBN: 0745652107
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Facebook is now used by nearly 500 million people throughout the world, many of whom spend several hours a day on this site. Once the preserve of youth, the largest increase in usage today is amongst the older sections of the population. Yet until now there has been no major study of the impact of these social networking sites upon the lives of their users. This book demonstrates that it can be profound. The tales in this book reveal how Facebook can become the means by which people find and cultivate relationships, but can also be instrumental in breaking up marriage. They reveal how Facebook can bring back the lives of people isolated in their homes by illness or age, by shyness or failure, but equally Facebook can devastate privacy and create scandal. We discover why some people believe that the truth of another person lies more in what you see online than face-to-face. We also see how Facebook has become a vehicle for business, the church, sex and memorialisation.
After a century in which we have assumed social networking and community to be in decline, Facebook has suddenly hugely expanded our social relationships, challenging the central assumptions of social science. It demonstrates one of the main tenets of anthropology - that individuals have always been social networking sites. This book examines in detail how Facebook transforms the lives of particular individuals, but it also presents a general theory of Facebook as culture and considers the likely consequences of social networking in the future.
conclusion is that the secret of Facebook’s success, along with that of similar social networks, lies not in change but in conservatism. Above all, Facebook really is quite literally a social network. Its importance lies in its perceived and actual ability to reconstruct relationships, especially within families and with absent friends, that had been gradually fading away due to the attrition of other aspects of modern life, such as increasing mobility. Facebook helps in some measure to reverse
naive about this. She knows what she is posting and why she is posting it. As she herself says: ‘Yeah, like at the moment, like yesterday morning, I get up and I was feeling for some strange reason, I wasn’t feeling bright, which I put up on Facebook. For some reason, I don’t know why today I am feeling a bit uncomfortable, something like that. But why I put that up? I could have called a million people and tell them why I feeling uncomfortable, but I didn’t do that. I put it on Facebook, and
business, i find it was a normal pic Most of the photos that people post of themselves are on the tame side. Some represent when they think they look particularly good, others when they were caught doing something silly, but not too silly. In fact, Aaron was quite shocked when one of the girls he knew posted a picture of herself in a bikini. The only other primary activity for ‘dressing’ one’s profile for general public display is what happens on one’s ‘wall’. Aaron’s is dominated not by his
line as that of the newspapers. The advantage of Facebook for Burton was that in the one place you could catch up with this kind of news, as well as all the more personal comings and goings of family and friends. Facebook was starting to become more comprehensive in a manner that rather interested Burton. He was wondering aloud if Facebook wasn’t undergoing some sort of shift at this time. Until recently, one of the problems was that Facebook was much better at informing you about good news than
Facebook friends, people you come to know much better because you see their postings every day. You may occasionally comment on them but you are never likely to meet them in any other capacity than on Facebook. When I first went onto Facebook, I agreed to be friended by ex-students, though after a short while I stopped this. But some of those early Facebook friends are people I feel I have now come to know quite well, which was not the case when they were students, yet I still never expect to see