RJ1 by yan wye kuin

Reflection journal by yan wye kuin

First off, I want to say that I only made a Facebook account last year, 2009(pretty late when you consider Facebook was opened to everyone in 2006), when I had just entered into Singapore polytechnic. The only reason why I had made one was because most of my peers had one so I wanted to be in trend.

At that time to me, Facebook was completely unnecessary to me or my lifestyle as I had the mentality that it was pointless to make superficial “friends” online when you can just make friends in real life. It took me a while to realise that people became as attached to these online friends as they were to their friends in real life.

Why? Two Factors: The need to be heard and the potential it has a social networking platform.

In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the third most important need after physiological and safety needs comes the need to be loved and to have a sense of belonging, AKA social needs. And I feel that Facebook is the ultimate platform to achieve that need in an incredibly simple and efficient way. As a standalone platform, Facebook has no content. Everything there is created by its members. From the status updates to the news feed about topics of interest to just about anything is created by them.

Maybe that’s why it is so easy to be fulfil the need to be heard; the content on Facebook is created by you, and heard by your friends. In a way it is much more powerful and interconnected than trying to be heard by friends in real life. There has always been that power to seat down with someone and talk face to face and the power to call someone up no matter where they are but it was only recently that people gained the power to keep in touch with all the people you’ve meet in your life who are important or were important at one point but you can’t keep up with them on a daily basis or won’t even go your way to call them. Facebook gives you that power, and all you have to do is type something and your entire network hears it on the news feed. Need fulfilled.

This is also the reason as to why I’ve become so absorbed into Facebook. Like I said earlier, the sole reason why I joined in the beginning was to keep in trend. It has become far more than that. My entire social circle has been transported from real life to the net. Everything I do and say is reflected onto Facebook.

For the simple reason that people need to be heard and Facebook is one of the most efficient/fastest platforms out there to do that, Facebook is successful. Of course there are other reasons.

The next factor is the incredible potential Facebook has to be. As the content is created by the members online, and that there are half a billion (and growing) registered users on it, it has become one of the biggest channels in media for just about anything. From Advertisers and international corporations to small fan pages about the most trivial of matters like cats. Reasons? Corporations use it to market their services and products and some people just want to use it to invite their friends over for a birthday dinner. Facebook just has the potential for aggressive expansion. For just about anything.

But because of this potential, it is also a double edged sword. The Facebook can become extremely transparent to people in the same social circle. For example, an employee criticising an employer and be easily heard by the employer through a friend of a friend. Because the Facebook has the potential to be so transparent, we have to be that much careful as to what we say on it. Ironically, in that way, it hinders our need to be speak out and to be heard honestly even though Facebook aims for its members to be interconnected.

Aside from the factors that contributed to Facebook’s success, how did The Social Network film portray the underbelly of Facebook’s more grittier side?

Again, as I’ve said earlier on Facebook is both a boon and a bane because of its potential transparency. Another reason as to why its a bane is because whatever people type on Facebook does not have to be entirely true. Well its a boon to whoever lies but that’s beside the point.

Mark Zukerberg, founder of Facebook, illustrates this point himself perfectly, or rather, Jesse Eisenberg portraying Mark Zukerberg in the movie. Zukerberg had to do a write up on four pieces of contemporary art so he pasted the pieces onto Facebook, got people to comment on them and later took those comments as his write up.

This shows that users can be more ignorant than they know it when using Facebook because anybody can post anything on Facebook as said earlier. Therefore, there is no true solution to fix this on Facebook. Everything depends on the users to use Facebok ethically because the users are ones who make up the content, as mentioned earlier.

Because of this, there is no true way for me to engage the online community ethically. It’s the internet; Anybody can body create an anonymous identity and post something. This way, it is difficult to find out the true intentions of the user and whether his intentions are ethical or unethical, even if I am doing something ethically. This is especially true on Facebook, which has the potential to be shaped into anything.