Koobecaf Essay by Brad CraemerThis is a featured page

In the past several years, the website known as Facebook, has exploded and become one of the most popular social websites ever used by Americans. Facebook (literally, an online book of faces, or friends) provides a venue for Americans to seek out as many friends and or contacts as they desire. The American culture looks positively on outgoing, social, and caring citizens. This status is what many Americans believe they can achieve through Facebook. Through writing encouraging messages on other peoples electronic “walls” to posting and looking at pictures of yourself and other people, Facebook provides a way to be social without actually leaving your home or coming into physical contact with other people. People may even look at Facebook as a way to network with others in the interest of keeping contacts for future business ventures. It is well known that in the economic infrastructure of the United States, it is all about who you know. Knowing someone in a high-powered job will increase your chances of getting a job with the company they work for, and in a culture that stresses financial success, well you have to know people in order to become wealthy. There is definitely a status factor involved in the motivation to use Facebook, in addition to other things. Americans use Facebook as an attempt to keep in touch with each other. Some Americans spend several hours per day on this electronic communication media, while others may only spend maybe a few minutes. There is also a noticeable difference in the way people of different genders use Facebook. Males typically spend less time on Facebook, just checking to see if anyone has “posted” new pictures of them to their electronic wall, or to see if anyone has “requested” to be their Facebook friend. By “requesting” to be someone’s friend on this website, you simply send them an electronic request, and when they see this request they can simply confirm that indeed you are their friend, or that no you are not friends and thus you get “ignored.” Females, it seems, spend more time on Facebook checking out everything from all of their friends’ relationship statuses, to new pictures of their friends, to messages, to people they are thinking of, to people they just recently met, etc. Females may spend much time on this website just researching how their friends are doing, and writing short encouraging remarks with a lot of punctuation such as exclamation points, or a combination of symbols such as a colon and a parenthesis to create what looks like a sideways happy face. One possible correlation of these gender differences with regard to Facebook is that American females are typically more relationship minded than guys, and thus they have to know all of their friends’ relationship statuses(and then call or message them to inquire about the status). Also, it seems to be more popular among the females to make the faces with the punctuation. The increased demand for electronic social networking and communication started a long time ago. With the invention of the internet, and the invention of email shortly following, there has been an exponential growth in online social activity. Following these inventions came social websites such as MySpace and Xanga, and then came Facebook. It seems that the first two websites among other similar ones set the stage, and built up a target audience for social internet websites such as Facebook. Therefore, when Facebook came along, with its prided “invitation only” privacy policy came along, along with its unique way of connecting people by school, it exploded in popularity. This shift toward using technology to be social has greatly affected the media over which America’s social structure is conducted. Facebook, in addition to similar online networking websites, can even be related to an increase in the production and sales in the technology industry, therefore affecting the American economic base, or infrastructure. Facebook at first glance is just a social website that American youth are fascinated by, but once you look deeply you can truly see the effect it has had on American culture.


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