Week2: Respond to content

I am a Facebook user... I’m not proud of it. But I am.

I have never been a user of MySpace, Twitter, Flickr and the various other social networks that seem to be taking over the internet. However, Facebook is my exception. My Facebook profile is the medium in which allows me to contact friends and family, and friends and family to contact me, particularly since moving from Western Australia. Phone calls and text messages no longer makes the cut. Having created a Facebook profile in 2009 was a direct result of feeling I needed it, to avoid exclusion. If I didn’t give in to adopting Facebook I truly felt I would have no idea of what was happening within our large group of friends.

Today, I use this convenient online network as a way of interacting with friends and family, when it suits me. I only have about 250 ‘friends’ on Facebook, but I know all of them. My lack of status updates, and new photos, makes me a definite, unexciting Facebook friend, but that is precisely what I do not use this site for.

Privacy is an apparent issue for me when using this network. However, it isn’t the fact that my information of where I live, and where I study is on my profile - I cannot protest against that as I authorise this information. It is the idea of photo tagging. I do not like being in other people’s photos, nor strangers being able to identify my name through my picture. I have received on many occasions, ‘friend requests’ that are from strangers who found my name through a friend’s photo.

Until recently, I had little knowledge of the privacy ‘terms’ I complied with 2 years ago when first signing up to Facebook. And it’s certainly made me uneasy. However, to disable this site would be to stop most of my communicating with friends, and perhaps some of my family. It is unfortunate, but I have become so reliant on Facebook, and the way I can communicate through this network, that I find it difficult to imagine my daily schedule without this site. Almost an addiction; I wake up, check Facebook, I’m eating lunch, check Facebook, I just finished work, check Facebook. It’s made the task of calling a friend, or meeting with family, slightly abnormal.