Koobecaf Assignment
Facebook has impacted our culture in both a positive and negative way. Our culture is all about gossip and if we hear something we believe it. This is the central to that gossip. Yea, you can go to local newsstands and get the daily newspaper and get caught up but this is the center of it all. I think this is why we have adopted Facebook into our culture. You are an outcast if you do not have it.
The barrel model allows us to describe how a certain subject, such as Facebook attributes to our culture in many different aspects. The barrel model consists of 3 main parts but 4 including the environment. The 3 parts are superstructure, dealing with our ideas, concepts and values. It then moves into the social structure, dealing with social and political organizations and kinship. Lastly is the infrastructure, dealing with technology, demographics, and our economic system.
Within the superstructure, there are many ways we are able to express our ideas, concepts and values through Facebook. Our ideas can be put out in groups, such as volunteer groups going out to help the community. You can invite others to join you in your idea and ask for their input as well. By updating our profile, it shows our values. You can limit this to just your name or go as far as your political status and religious views. The superstructure is like the shell of Facebook. Moving into the social structure takes us a little deeper within Facebook.
The social structure centralizes around social and political organizations as well as kinship. You can express your political status as stated within in the superstructure, but you can also go as far as joining a Facebook campaign and voicing yourself within Facebook by joining your party’s application. Facebook has allowed the presidential candidates as well as representatives to voice themselves to the youth. This is getting the youth more involved within our political system. We have many social organizations we may belong to as well, such as Big Brothers, Big Sisters. You can find out information on this by just typing it in the search bar. It is an easy way for you to get involved within your community as well as your school. Many of these social organizations create groups or even go as far as creating applications for you to join and get involved.
Lastly you have the infrastructure. Which is also deeper within Facebook as compared to the superstructure. This deals with technology, demographics, and the economic system. Facebook keeps becoming technologically advanced by the new applications coming in as well as the things possible to do through Facebook. The marketplace is an application where you can put items such as your used textbooks up for sale on your college’s marketplace and sell them. It goes as far as selling textbooks to finding a roommate to get an apartment with you. It is linking many people across the world. Our demographics are more stated within the superstructure and saying who we really are.
There are all these positive things, but then you can go into the negative. You can always use Facebook to falsely advertise yourself and make you the person you want to be, but it is not who you really are. Facebook has become a way of live for Americans and without it many of us would be lost. People spend hours on Facebook a day, stalking others as well as chatting. It links us to other people and allows mass messaging to happen. Without it many college students would lose their only way of communication to many others.