GLOBALIZATION AND FACEBOOK

Globalization and Facebook

Globalization and Facebook

Introduction

In the first decade of the 2000s, social network sites (SNS) emerged as one of the dominant means for accessing information and communication online. This has led to simultaneous concerns about the quality of friendships on these sites, as well as the abundance of information stored and how it is accessed. Sociologists and social network analysts have shown that Facebook, as an exemplar SNS, leads to greater social capital and an expanded friend network, but it does so at the expense of privacy and the ability to do granular impression management online (Buckingham, 2006, 11).

Facebook is now considered a topic in its own right, as the site has over 500 million active users and is the world's second most popular site after Google. Facebook regularly publishes statistics on this traffic, and it consistently claims that at least half of its user base logs in every day. As a consequence, when an academic says they study social networks, the lay audience is probably more likely to think of Facebook than nodes, edges, name generators, and exponential random graph models (ERGMs).

Facebook's Meteoric Rise

Mark Zuckerberg created a site called Facemash at Harvard in late 2003. In February 2004, it was rebranded as Facebook and was released to selected university communities. The early history of the site remains a contentious issue for Zuckerberg, as it is unclear how much the site was related to another project, the Harvard Connection. The Harvard Connection founders and Zuckerberg settled out of court. Nevertheless, the notoriety of Facebook's early years was the subject of a successful, semifictionalized Hollywood blockbuster, The Social Network.

Facebook was hardly the first social network site. Prior to Facebook, Six Degrees, MySpace, and Friendster all enjoyed substantial popularity. However, Facebook's simple aesthetic, perceived legitimacy, and capacity to scale led to very rapid growth, first among college campuses and then within the wider North American population. In September 2006, the site was available to anyone over 13 with a valid e-mail address.

The basic function of Facebook is to facilitate information sharing between individuals who have indicated that they are mutual friends. This information includes archival material, such as photos and blog posts, as well as real-time material (status updates and a chat window) and information about the future (such as events and birthdays). Because of the comprehensive functions available on this site, Facebook brands itself as a “social utility.” Nevertheless, scholars still tend to consider the site an example of a social network site. On a social network site, each person gets his or her own account and then can stipulate which other accounts they want to access. This is an example of what Barry Wellman had previously called “person-to-person” networking, where individuals connect directly to each other, often through personal electronic devices and accounts. This can be contrasted with place-to-place networking, where people associate through shared mutual contexts (Dartnell, 2006, 85).

Discussion and Analysis

Facebook, like many other social network sites, use the term friend to indicate a base relationship between two ...