The World of Facebook

Facebook is one of the virtual communities I’m a part off. I’m a late comer to the world of Facebook. I became a member in January 2009 because a former co-worker, who now lives in Seattle, constantly bugged me to join either MySpace or Facebook and I finally gave in. I choose Facebook because almost all the MySpace pages I had seen looked like jumbled messes, including my co-workers.

On Facebook, you send out friend requests, or as I call them “friquests,” to your friends. Anyone who is your FB friend can see the information you post about yourself, depending on your privacy settings. Once someone is your FB friend, they will receive your status updates, which keep them up to date on what is going on in your life.

At first, the majority of my FB friends were people I saw on a daily basis so I didn’t really see much point in it. Then my friend Caryn joined. Caryn and I have been friends since were fifteen years old, which was a long time ago, we even took driver’s training together! Our schedules have been the complete opposite of each others for a long time, making it hard to find time in both our schedules to get together to have dinner. Because of Facebook, we are able to keep current with everything that is going on in each other’s lives. When we are able to meet for dinner, we pick up where we left off in Facebook, instead of playing catch up.

My sister Amy was reluctant to join Facebook because technology is not her friend. She finally got to the point where she was comfortable sending emails (took forever to break her of her habit of using ALL CAPS). She felt learning to use Facebook would be too difficult. She uses a computer at work, but only to enter a limited amount of information. She felt that she would need to be a computer nerd to be able to figure it out or that she would do something wrong and would somehow break it. What she needed to feel comfortable using Facebook was someone sitting with her and walking her through the different features of Facebook and assuring her that she couldn’t break it. It wasn’t a lack of education, reading skills, or access to a computer that made her stay away from Facebook, or the internet in general. It was that she didn’t know what kind of value using it could add to her life and that she thought there would be a steep learning curve. Now that she feels comfortable using it she’s always online.