Week 3 Participation

This week I completed the following tasks for class participation:

• Completed all week three assigned readings.
• Posted three blog entries (this makes four).
• Read all my classmates' blogs and the official class blog, and posted comments on 12 separate entries.
• Read week three discussion board content and contributed three comments.
• Read some blogs on Web 2.0 and marketing, including investing in your audiences.
• Researched online communities for the observations paper. Began lurking/participating in said communities.
• Researched possible formats/hosts for my produsage project, including checking out a few leads from my fellow classmates. At this point, I haven’t made a decision though.
  

Has Facebook Changed Your Life?

According to this article, sometime next week Facebook will reach 500 million users. To celebrate, Facebook will launch a visual memorial to all the ways that the social network has changed people’s lives, such as through finding love or documenting natural disasters.

I give kudos to Facebook for being able to attract such an overwhelming following to their social utility, but I also find myself somewhat skeptical to the idea that Facebook has actually changed lives. Our lives are altered by momentous experiences such as being accepted to college, getting married, having children, losing loved ones, being diagnosed with illness, etc. Does Facebook really qualify as one of these life-changing experiences? I’m not so sure. Perhaps there are a handful of people who did fall in love through a Facebook connection or landed a job because of their social networking skills, but I can’t imagine that the majority of those 500 million users would fall into that category.

Has Facebook changed my life? Somewhat. Now, I have an excuse not to travel to my high school reunion because I can stalk all my old classmates on Facebook. Now, when I go out to dinner with friends I have to make sure that I don’t let anyone take pictures of me a martini in hand because those pictures will surely end up tagged on Facebook. Now, I have to monitor my privacy settings in case potential employers or old boyfriends decide to look me up on Facebook. For me, Facebook is a double-edged sword. I enjoy the connectivity, but I don’t enjoy that increasing levels of personal information are floating around in cyberspace for people to access.

Would you say that Facebook has changed your life in a positive way, negative way, or not at all? What about other social networks?

Biologically Wired for Connectivity?

This morning I stumbled across the Sunday Book Review of “Hamlet’s Blackberry” from the New York Times, and was intrigued by the article title, “Born to Check Mail.”

The author, Laurie Winer, comments on society’s “obsessive connectivity and its effect on our brains and very way of life.” Winer in fact, admits to frequently tearing herself away from reading to address the email notification pings on her iPhone. This made me chuckle to myself, as I also frequently pause during reading or my favorite episode of Grey’s Anatomy to make sure nothing new and exciting has popped up on my Facebook wall.

According to the article, these kinds of notifications may actually set off a “dopamine squirt” in our brains. Marketers told us that we need to be connected, but our genetic brain processes may have solidified the need to repeatedly do so. We are literally getting a high from the attention delivered through social connectivity.

This information led me to think about the vaguebooking phenomenon posted by Vanessa earlier this week. Are vaguebookers actually being compelled to seek attention through biological chemical processes in their brain? Just some food for thought…