I am not usually a fan of anything written in Tufts student publications. They are usually poorly written, and unless focusing exclusively on campus issues, simply repeat information that could be found in real publications. This weeks Observer however has an article worth checking out because of its relevance to our class and that fact that its actually pretty well written.
Micah Hauser and Michael Goetzman's article "All My Friends" about Facebook addresses lots of the issues that we talked about earlier this semester and provides an interesting perspective to add to our discussion. They make an interesting point about Facebook being similar to a small town in the larger anonymous world of the internet. Through the newsfeed people can passively take in information about all of their friends, similar to how people do offline by seeing people and hearing what friends of friends are up to. Hauser and Goetzman beleive that Facebook is a legitimate community that happens to be online. I think that we should view the website we are creating in similar terms. We are creating a legitimate online community of people who are involved in offline community activism of some kind.
Sadly there is no link on the Observer website but you can pick up a copy around campus.
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WOW! I agreed with the article of how facebook creates another sense of community. Not that we could update with our friends' lives and check out upcoming events, but we can also look through other people's semi-personal lives via facebook.
ReplyDeleteFacebook is a great marketing tool for everybody - yourselves, a company, a community, a group, etc. However, there are some negative sides of facebook as well as other social networking site (semi related to our project - as a social network community for somerville). The number one problem that people are most concerned is the privacy issue.
If we think about our website... yes, the organizations in our community will be advertising about themselves and let more people to know about them. They will also get to let people in the community know about their upcoming events and let the community connect with the organizations. However, if it began successful, I'm sure that the privacy issue will come up somehow.