Comments on: Facebook and Social Networking (115)

By: Howard Chang

Howard Chang — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:34:50 +0000

Rin, the difference between facebook and your home is that certain spaces in your home (your closet, medicine cabinet, maybe bedroom, contents of your fridge, file cabinet, etc.) maintain a socially accepted expectation of privacy. I argue that the same is not true of facebook. If you are procatively uploading things online for your facebook friends to see, it is the same as having it on your mantle at home, magneted to your fridge door, or on the walls of your living room. Anything you upload or write on your facebook is up there by your choice and your action, so why complain when someone looks? That’s at least how I see it. After all, if you feel differently, you always have the option to put someone on “limited” access, right?

By: John M. Kirton II

John M. Kirton II — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:16:39 +0000

Just recently (week(?) of April 28), Facebook (FB) has added the language option of “English (pirate)”, which is really fun to use!

I have found that FB is a great networking tool for me to keep up with my friends who are geographically far away.

By: Lucy

Lucy — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 10:48:38 +0000

I’m a first time listener and enjoyed this podcast on my way to work this morning. I work a lot with both social media and language so I was excited that the first ‘cast I was to listen to was about the two!

However, as @Phil comments, I was a little surprised that there wasn’t more meaty discussion of language; it seemed to be more of an acknowledgment that different language was being used than an analysis of this evolution.

That aside, I very much enjoyed the show and will definitely be listening again.

Thanks,
Lucy

By: Phil

Phil — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 01:37:42 +0000

It seemed that this episode was a bit lacking in discussion of actual language; a great deal of it seemed devoted to describing everything one can do on Facebook.

By: Volker

Volker — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 06:43:42 +0000

You know what the best thing about facebook is to me? That it brought me a mentioning on the Word Nerds Podcast. I listened to this episode on the bus and probably the people around me wondered why I suddenly started to smile so much. It was when I unexpectedly heard my name on your show.

A very good show again, and you select very good music for it, too!

Best wishes from Hamburg,
Volker

By: Rin

Rin — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 04:20:18 +0000

Just wanted to comment on something Howard Chang brought up — he said he didn’t understand why it would be creepy to ’stalk’ someone on facebook… after all, they accepted me as a friend, so why would they care if I looked at them?

That makes a lot of sense, but, truthfully, my instinctive reaction to that was, “uhh, weird.” I grew up with the Internet, so my Facebook “Home” is much less of an intangible thing for me; it truly, literally occupies a place in my social life. It’s not an “extension” and it’s not a “representation.” People older than MTV will invariably describe Facebook as if it’s the metaphorical phantom limb of any person whose social life has been severed by the millennium. “Facebook: it’s the futuristically bionic super-prosthetic X-treme!” Meh. For MY generation, the Internet is all we’ve ever known. So when it comes down to it, my “Facebook home” is very “reality” to me; I would expect my facebook friends to observe the same social norms that would be observed in a real home. So if I invited all my friends to a slumber party, one or two of them would be really close to me, and the rest would have their own spots along my friend-acquaintance continuum. Howard and Dave seemed to be saying (correct me if I’m wrong on this) that Facebook effectively combines my “friends” with my “acquaintances,” but it doesn’t. If I say, “Make yourself at home,” it wouldn’t be a lie, but if you’re more “acquaintance” than “friend,” I wouldn’t *really* expect you to go digging in the back of my fridge. So if you have a midnight snack while I’m asleep, you’ll probably tell me that morning, “By the way, I ate some of your fritos last night.” Not that it’s a major social transgression, but wouldn’t it just feel weird to keep something like that to yourself? Same thing with Facebook. Facebook is Fritos to us.