Facebook has created a new era of communicating with friends and has gone as far as creating its own culture. Millions of people from all areas of the world, and of thousands of different backgrounds, have made Facebook profiles. It creates an atmosphere of meeting new people and staying in touch with friends with features that allow the user to display pictures of themselves, interests, books their reading, TV shows, and much more. It’s an escalating trend that is growing on college campuses, middle and high schools, and even offices.
The environment of Facebook is a unique one, because it’s the internet itself. Facebook has moved beyond the environment of what was around us into an environment that is basically millions of lines of code. The popularity of Facebook is to a point were advertisers want to take advantage of the fact million of people visit it everyday. This is an effect on our infrastructure in American culture. It has opened new doors for large companies to display their image, or even small businesses. People who have Facebook can advertise their business on their own personal profile if they wish. Obviously there are limits, however it helps showing it among friends and can benefit in more ways than one.
Not only is Facebook changing the way we share are thoughts and days with groups of friends, but it is adding too and/or changing our language. In our generation people have become quite lazy and this is one reason Facebook might be so successful, instead of going out every single today to be with your friends, people simply switch on their computers. However because of this laziness instead of typing full words and sentences we have created new shortened versions such as the very common “lol,” which stands for “laugh out loud.” There are hundred’s of these shortened phrases that even I recognize but all and all it’s a language of its own and their are probably thousand’s of different phrases out there.
The largest foundation of Facebook comes in the social structure. As I explained before, you can see that the possibilities of the social organizations of Facebook are practically limitless. Groups are created among friends, events, or even just a common shared belief (superstructure). Facebook branches people’s personal images out by breaking down some of the old-fashioned barriers that were a single group of lunchroom friends. The foundation of meeting people outside of Facebook is still their but once you add them as a friend, it opens the doors for you to meet their friends and then their friend’s friends and that is why the community of Facebook is so large. The ideas that such a large society can make, in a way, is groundbreaking and sets up a culture that, even now, political campaigns and companies invest time and money into so that they can continue to operate and understand American culture.
Facebook is just the start, eventually more and more types of social networks will develop as trends shift and technology develops. The cultures that these networks create are ever growing and constantly changing the image of American society and adjusting the perception that we not only have on ourselves but on the world.