Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellison wrote in their article "Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scolarship" that Facebook is egocentric network, because the individual is at the center of its own community. This differs from early public online communities, where topics, common interests or hobbies were central. In my opinion Facebook really is egocentric, also from a different perspective. Facebook can be understood as egocentric tool because it helps individuals to pump their egos up.
SHOW OFF YOUR FRIENDS
Facebook enables people to make visible their social networks or if we put it simple, we can see how many “friends” an individual has. Of course we are not talking about real friends here, because it would be impossible for a person to maintain as many friendships as they have listed on Facebook. Anyways just because there is a counter of how many friends a user has, many people feel some kind of competition to have as many friends as possible, to show others that they are popular.
Here is an interesting article about collecting friends on Facebook, which reveals that most people have 5 close friends and an average of 150 people in their social network. The article also mentions so called “trophy friends” which mostly refer to Facebook profiles of celebrities.
Another interesting article about collecting friends on Facebook is available here and it also mentions an interesting phenomenon of “defriending”.
SHOW EVERYONE THAT YOU’VE ENJOYED YOUSELF
People are now able to share their photos from holidays, travels and trips with their friends. If we are honest, Facebook actually enables to “show off”, to let everyone see how you’ve enjoyed yourself and maybe even make them jealous.
TELL EVERYONE WHAT HAS JUST HAPPENED TO YOU
When something amazing or terrible happens to you and there is no one around to tell him, you can just update your Facebook status and pour your feelings and thoughts to your wall and your friends’ news feed. Then you wait. You wait for the “likes” and comments and feel good about the attention you’ve received.
LET EVERYONE SEE WHERE YOU ARE PLANNING TO GO
When people confirm their attendance to Facebook events, they enable all of their friend to see where they will be at certain point of time. And maybe even latently brag about it.
Of course not everyone use Facebook in such way, but I’m sure that in some way people really do pump up their egos with Facebook. Admit it or not, you feel good when you publish something and gets many “likes” and comments from friends. Using Facebook for bragging or not, it is a fact that we do things there, we wouldn’t do in face to face interactions with friends.
And here is the proof! See it for yourself how our Facebook activities would like like in face to face communication.
With written, of course I agree, but we need to know that the nature of Facebook users is not unique and each has its own ways of uses, some of them use Facebook to lookout what other do, the other uses it for connecting with their friend, to a third it can be mmechanism of inflated ego, fourth for something entirely different. So the generation in this case without the underpinning of the numbers might be questionable. Best, Sasa
OdgovoriIzbrišiThank you for your first comment :). Of course I agree with you, that generalization is not appropriate, and of course I exaggerated in my writing to make a point.. Anyways I believe that people are narcissistic in their nature, some more, some less, and Facebebook is to some extent a tool to pump up your ego, compare with others...
OdgovoriIzbriši