Relational Technology Tool Facebook - Research Paper Example

? Analysis of a Relational Technology Tool Table of Contents I. Introduction 3 II. History of the Platform 5 III. Identity Development 7 IV. Relational Aspects, Functionalities 9 V. Formation and Management of Communities 9 VI. Events, News and Information Social Discovery 10 References 12 I. Introduction This paper undertakes an analysis of Facebook as representative of social media and as a relational technology tool. As prescribed, the analysis covers vital aspects of Facebook in the context of exploring communication that is mediated by computers, and includes a discussion on Facebook' history; how identity is formed on the platform; Facebook functionalities and relational characteristics/aspects; the formation and display of relationships; the formation and management of communities; and how information, events and news are discovered in a social context in Facebook. These aspects are covered with an eye towards being able to understand the achievement of the function of Facebook as a relational technology; the application of Facebook to one aspect of computer-mediated communication or CMC; critiquing how Facebook supports the achievement of the goals of CMC; and making recommendations on better means of accomplishing the goals related to CMC (Lord, 2003; Barnes, 2002). Facebook touts itself as being in the business of creating products that provide utility value to advertisers, developers and end-users, through the Facebook platform. That platform is a social media platform that end-users utilize to be able to connect and interact with their families and friends, as well as to know more about the world through the news and the shared information from friends and created pages that are made possible through their being posted on the social media platform. Developers have a stake in making use of the platform to create applications that leverage the user base and the technical and social media strength of the platform. Advertisers on the other hand, as the third leg of the ecosystem after users and developers, can leverage the large user base of Facebook and the social nature of their interactions to reach large targeted audiences for their products and services (Google, 2013). The end-user focused products are many and have been well-developed and evolved after many years of use by millions of users around the world. Those products are made available to users on the Facebook platform, which in turn can be accessed from a host of devices, from personal computers to tablets to smart phones by the largest providers of devices in the world, from Apple to Android devices to other operating system platforms and form factors. The key end-user products include Timeline, News Feed, Places, Pages, and the photo uploading service. There is also an email and a chat facility to complement the other forms of sharing and communication on the platform. News Feed is a personalized platform for the sharing of information, news and status posts from friends, from various Pages, and from other parties that have presence on Facebook. Pages are user-created Facebook pages that cater to various content and interests providers and enthusiasts, and include Fan pages for artists, pages for news and media organizations, official pages of artists and public figures, and the like. The scale of the Pages product is demonstrated in the stat which says that as of the second quarter of 2012, about 42 million pages exist on Facebook, that have ten or more Likes. Likes is a Facebook feature that allows users to tag posts and Pages that they like. The photo service is another end-user product that allows users to upload, share and archive digital images on Facebook. The Places product, meanwhile, allows users to share their locations and the places that they visit to friends and family. The tagging functionality in the Photos app allows for another layer of social sharing of photos that include information on the users who are in the photos. This is a social way of annotating and sharing the photos (Reuters, 2013). II. History of the Platform Facebook traces its birth as a company to 2004, when it achieved incorporation with the name Facebook Inc. When it was born it was an online directory with Harvard students being the first participants. Mark Zuckerberg became CEO, having also been the progenitor of an earlier version of the platform known as Facemash, making use of photographs of students that Zuckerberg got from Harvard's servers. That was followed by thefacebook.com, which differed from Facemash in that the latter iteration made students upload the photos themselves. From the time of its incorporation in July of 2004 through the end of that year, Facebook would be able to enjoy the following of more than one million users. In the early goings it was an exclusive platform catering only to Ivy League students, and requiring that users have a .edu email suffix for admission, but later on, with a bolder ambition to catalog and map human relationships, Facebook would break out from its Ivy League roots to welcome a greater mass of people into the platform, welcoming high school students too, as well as workers employed in some of the large corporations that Facebook identified. From a social networking platform, the move allowed Facebook users, in college, to retain their networks of friends as they transitioned to the workplace from school, even as allowing high school kids to join also meant that college users would be able to retain the network ties with their younger friends and family. By 2006, Facebook had morphed from the feature possibilities offered by Web 2.0, which included giving the users the power to share rich multimedia content, including videos and music. Web 2.0 also gave developers the chance to plug into the social network with a slew of new apps, and those apps proved to be a success in the sense that a handful garnered more than one million followers barely a month after the platform provided enabling tools to developers. Meanwhile, these and other advances allowed Facebook to gradually creep into the second spot in the social media space behind MySpace, prompting some parties such as Yahoo! to offer bids to acquire Facebook, which Zuckerberg did not accept. By 2006 it was evident, with Facebook signing up with Microsoft for some of its ads, that Facebook was a considerable threat to MySpace. Fast forward to today, and its revenues and profits from advertising continue to soar, even as its stock and market capitalization has managed to creep upwards in a large quantum manner to historical highs. A billion users later, Facebook had become the premier social media platform in the world, with great growth prospects and the confidence of the investing going up as can be gleaned from the lofty valuations of the stock (Ingram, 2013; Google, 2013; Reuters, 2013). In the interim it would achieve a market capitalization of about US 41 billion dollars in 2010, while catapulting itself to become the third biggest website on the planet, after Amazon and Google. By 2011, it had become the second most used website in America, after Google. The IPO and listing on the stock exchange was done in May of 2012, during which time the company was valued at US 104 billion dollars, and the share price at US 38 dollars per share. Recent share prices indicate that Facebook has come to exceed the IPO valuation substantially, after being in the doldrums for about a year due to a host of factors. The rise in revenues and profits seem to have assuaged investor fears relating to the viability of its business model, driving up enthusiasm and the price of the stock of late (Google, 2013; Answers Corporation, 2013; Reuters, 2013). III. Identity Development The literature notes that in Facebook, the non-anonymous nature of the user accounts and the emphasis on relationships have all worked towards the evolution of new forms of identity development in the social networking platform that are different from identity development dynamics in anonymous platforms, where the emphasis seemed to have been the preservation of anonymity, and greater leeway in terms of engaging in games of role play and in going against the grain or against what can be construed as the norm in behavior. Here the loss of anonymity has the upside of forging identities that are closer to the real-life social selves of the users. The emphasis it is said is in letting group associations and friends circles define who the individual is in terms of a personal identity that feeds off those social networks for validity and for definition (Zhao, Grasmuck and Martin., 2008). There is also a greater concern with regard to the way users manage their own identities, and to establish distinctions and divisions among various friends groups as a way to effect identity management. Association with the consumption preferences of the users as a way to manage online identities on Facebook is also an important aspect of identity building dynamics as well (Hewitt and Forte, 2006). The ability to manage work and non-work relationships meanwhile, is seen as a challenge to successful identity development, owing to established trends of employees making use of their Facebook accounts to network among each other, even as people generally have different identities when at the workplace and when among friends. This aspect of identity development and management, pertaining to managing work and private identities, is a vital consideration and concern. There is room for improvement in the way Facebook provides facilities and frameworks within the platform for developing identities that take into account that users have private and work/public identities. Being able to provide means to segregate friends and to classify posts into work and private can go a long way towards being better able to develop and manage identities on the social network (DiMicco and Millen, 2007; Lord, 2003; Barnes, 2002). IV. Relational Aspects, Functionalities Most aspects of the identity of the user on Facebook seem to be geared towards highlighting the relational aspects of that identity, and the functionalities that are provided, from the email to the Like facilities, to the Newsfeed that highlight what friends and liked pages share, to the tagging of photos and the facilities to review friendship histories and friend networks, also reinforce the social aspects of almost all of the content. The emphasis in the tools for facilitating social interactions seem to be the ability to extend the data to include the social aspects of that data, or the way the data relates to users and the social networks of particular users. To cite an example, Facebook photos have options to tag friends and family included in the photos. The tagging feature also allows photo uploaders to notify friends and family who may be interested in them. The Like button allows users to signify preferences for many different things, that his friends and family can pick up, reinforcing the social and relational aspects of data/ These aspects are very well developed in Facebook. Recommendations for improvement include further refining the tools and functionalities to enhance the relational capabilities of users (Facebook., 2013; Reuters, 2013; Lord, 2003; Barnes, 2002; Google, 2013). V. Formation and Management of Communities Facebook Pages allow users to create communities based on common interests and likes. They also allow celebrities, artists, group leaders, organizations of all kinds, religious groups, political groups, and all kinds of special interest groups to have their individual homes in the pages that they create, and which followers like in order to be part of a community based on that page. Within messages, there are facilities to engage in group chat and group communication, which amounts to the formation of smaller communities as well. Groups can be managed in terms of visibility from the outside world, among members, and the general Facebook population, depending on preferences. Group memberships can be managed as well via the ability of members to either accept or reject membership applications, or to either have the power to add new members into groups or not. These are evolving and proven tools for forming and managing groups and communities within Facebook. Communities management is already well-managed, but there is room for improvement in terms of providing search functionalities for discussion groups and Page and community posts. (Facebook., 2013; Reuters, 2013; Lord, 2003; Barnes, 2002; Google, 2013). VI. Events, News and Information Social Discovery Users are able to post updates, news, music, videos, photos, bits of information, links to web pages and articles, and posts from other users and pages on their timelines, and these show as newsfeed entries on the pages of friends, family, and followers. In this way, the user acts as a curating agent for things that are relevant to him and may also be relevant to his network of friends. A user may also subscribe to other sources of information, news and bits of data, which he may Like, and that Like also appears on the Newsfeeds of his or her friends and followers. Liked pages of users can be browsed by other friends and followers, and those friends can also like the same pages, in a cascade of likes that can result in important news and other content being surfaced and circulated among the group. Int this way every piece of publicly shared information or data put into the social media platform is essentially surfaced data, and which the social network can circulate and make available to those who have the proper access rights. This means in general that all data is social data, and members in a social network on Facebook get to see that piece of information/data. This is already well-developed in Facebook and has allowed for Facebook feeds and Pages being formidable sources of relevant, curated news and other inputs (Facebook., 2013; Reuters, 2013; Lord, 2003; Barnes, 2002; Google, 2013; Answers Corporation, 2013). References Answers Corporation (2013). Facebook. Answers.com. Retrieved from http://www.answers.com/topic/facebook Barnes, S. (2002). Computer-Mediated Communication: Human-to-Human Communication Across the Internet. Pearson DiMicco, J. and Millen, D. (2007). Identity Management: Multiple Representations of Self in Facebook. Group '07/ IBM T.J Watson Research. Retrieved from http://www.davidmillen.com/publications/group2007-dimicco.pdf Facebook (2013). Facebook Home Page. Facebook.com. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/ Google (2013). Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB). Google Finance. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/finance?cid=296878244325128 Hewitt, A. and Forte, A. (2006). Crossing Boundaries: Identity Management and Student/Faculty Relationships on the Facebook. CSCW '06/Georgia Institute of Technology. Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.94.8152&rep=rep1&type=pdf Ingram, F. (2013). Facebook Inc. Gale Directory of Company Histories. Retrieved from http://www.answers.com/topic/facebook Lord, G. (2003). Review of Computer-Mediated Communication: Human-to-Human Communication Across the Internet. Language Learning & Technology. Retrieved from http://llt.msu.edu/vol7num3/pdf/review1.pdf Reuters (2013). Facebook Inc. (FB.O). Reuters.com. Retrieved from http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/companyProfile?rpc=66&symbol=FB.O Zhao, S., Grasmuck, S. and Martin, J. (2008). Identity Construction on Facebook: Digital empowerment in anchored relationships. Computers in Human Behavior 24. Retrieved from http://astro.temple.edu/~bzhao001/Identity%20Construction%20on%20Facebook.pdf Read More