Question 1:
Some of the most influential factors that had contributed to Facebook’s success today would be Facebook’s CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of making the world better connected through building user base and giving them the best user experience. According to Facebook, its mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.
This is evidently shown in the movie which highlighted some main categories users could share such as their relationship statuses, postings on their “Walls” amongst others and users could also “facebook” each other to find people to add to their friends’ community. For example, during a Bill Gates lecture, Mark and his friend had met 2 other Harvard girls – Christy and Alice and both girls had asked them to “facebook” them so that they can hang out and drink together.
In the later part of the movie, Mark had also mentioned that the users of Facebook are interconnected, that is, these users are online because their friends are online as well. Therefore, if the network crashes, users would not be able to see each other’s online statuses. So if user A is seen as being offline by user B, then similarly, user B will go offline since his friend (user A) isn’t online.
Unlike many entrepreneurs, Mark had cared more about the connections among people rather than just generating revenue from the social networking site.
This is shown in that Mark and his best friend Eduardo had, at one point, conflicts about generating revenue through the use of advertising. Mark had disagreed on using advertisement pop-ups to generate revenue because he thinks that advertisements were not cool and against the image he wanted to create of Facebook as being cool and exclusive via friend invites.
Another influential factor that gave rise to Facebook’s success today would be its socioeconomic motives.
First of all, education. The Facebook creators themselves were from Harvard, an Ivy League school. Secondly, the first batch of students who began using Facebook were a privileged group of youths who could attend a four-year college, as seen in the movie, where some of the first ones who joined Facebook (aside from the creators) were students from Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Stamford. Through Facebook, it let these students into exclusive members-only places online through invitations, just like the prestigious Phoenix Club mentioned in the movie. This was in contrast with what MySpace and Friendster had to offer, where people from all walks of life could view your page, interests and biography. There was no such added element of exclusivity.
As Facebook radiated outward, taking on colleges further down in rankings, it was a class effect that elevated the perceived status of membership, one that still continued today.
Although its success can be attributed to its interconnectivity among people and socioeconomic motives, Facebook has indeed left both positive and negative impacts on my life.
Facebook was the social networking site that had enabled a reunion with most of my formal primary and secondary school classmates which I had not been in contact with since my graduation days. That added capability of finding friends via their names, email addresses or friends’ suggestions allowed me to reunite, reconnect with old friends. Thanks to Facebook, I got to know where and what my friends are studying at and got a preview of their everyday lives.
For example, recently, a former primary school classmate of mine had just created a group exclusively for the 1992 cohort as she wanted to reunite everyone for a gathering. Through the group contacts, I managed to find some of my former friends that she had invited in the group.
Some negative impacts would be that social networking sites like Facebook become an addiction and a form of distraction although they help to better connect everyone. In project discussions for instance, it’s almost always possible to find a group member logged into Facebook or any social networking sites and getting distracted by their friends who happened to have posted updates because everyone’s so connected with one another. Although it’s to get you more involved, connected and updated with current social affairs, it can also be annoying at the same time. Also, other social networking sites like Twitter can also be a form of addiction as it becomes a habit to update your status once in every few minutes or seconds.
Question 2:
I think an unethical use of Facebook in the movie was that both Mark and Eduardo had used Facebook to connect with two fellow Harvard students, Christy and Alice, which eventually led to them hanging out at a bar and having sexual activity in the restrooms. In other words, they had made use of Facebook indirectly for sexual intentions.
Such cases are common these days. According to Digg, there was an article about a woman who was a Facebook sex addict and she had made use of the social networking site to find men. It was even reported that she had slept with 50 men altogether.
Personally, it seems to me that these people have got really no hope and have to resort to such low ways to hook up. I think it’s because these people are lacking behind in reality (in terms of social life) so therefore, they’re trying to fulfill their social interests online because the new people you meet online are more unlikely to know about your background etc.
A good example is evidently shown in the movie. Facebook founder Mark was being portrayed as having only a few friends who are basically his programming roommates and good friend Eduardo. Therefore, it is highly likely that students like Mark, with no social life, would definitely be interested in what it feels like to have one. Naturally people like him would want to gain that kind of experience so as to fill the empty space in his social life, so why not?
However, I find that using social networking sites for personal self-contentment such as sexual intentions is just plain wrong. It’s so hard to tell who’s the actual person behind that Facebook identity that you’ve been communicating with. For all we know, it could be a false persona that an online predator had created. It’s also being depicted in the movie, like how Eduardo actually did not know much about his girlfriend Christy whom he later found out to be a little fanatical and in the end, they broke up nevertheless.
No matter what, I feel that social networking sites should be used solely for the purposes of interacting with friends, staying connected to the ground and not using it for their own selfish aims of fulfilling sexual intentions.
While meeting new people from all walks of life is indeed fun, we should also constantly exercise self-caution and stay alert of whom we are communicating with.
One way of reaching out to an online community ethically through blogs from a marketing point of view would be that whatever information you post, ensure that you’re able to deliver it and not oversell your ideas, products or services. If you overpromise or oversell, ultimately your organization will be the one getting into trouble and by then, you wouldn’t be successful in reaching out or retaining online customers. Also, any information posted to the online community should not defame anyone (i.e. competitors) as it could create legal liability on your part.
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