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From: www.thegetsmartblog.com
What is power? This is a question that has many answers, but
ideally power is everywhere. “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch
the ruling ideas” (Mark, 1845). Power will always be part of our daily lives,
but disempowerment also affects us in many ways. This becomes apparent and
easier to understand through our reading and has made me realise just how
powering/disempowering social media can be.
The social network that I will be blogging about for the weeks to
come is Facebook. I signed up for this social site that took the world by storm
in 2008. It wasn’t as big as it is today, but the presence of power was
everywhere.
As Facebook became more dominant in peoples lives, I found myself
checking my ‘newsfeed’ more and more. Facebook soon started flexing its
dominance, which then caused other social media sites such as MySpace and Bebo
losing people more rapidly, whilst Facebook was gaining those people and then
some. Karl
Marx ideology still stands today, even though he probably wasn’t thinking
of Facebook and other social sites when he talked about production.
Facebook compromised MySpace’s and Bebo’s production by influencing there
members to go to them, this gave Facebook more production, hence more power not
just on social media, but throughout the world. Since Facebook’s conquest to
take over the Internet world began, Bebo and MySpace have flunked and are
barely spoken of, except to reminisce on how young and naïve we were back in
the day.
As Facebook continues its stranglehold on all social medias, I
stop to ask, ‘what makes us continually go back to the same website day in and
day out’? Over the next few weeks I will be closely monitoring Facebook and
hope to find out what makes it so empowering over our lives.
Reference List
Allen, J (2003). Lost Geographies of Power. Malden, MA.
Blackwell Publishing
Age-of-the-sage. Marx & Historical Materialism.
Retrieved from
Mark, K (1845). BA1002: Our Space: Networks, Narratives and
the Making of Place, Lecture 2 PowerPoint. Retrieved from http://www.learnjcu.edu.au
Image Credits
Ayers, B (2011). Grow your social network but not on
Facebook. Retrieved from: http://www.thegetsmartblog.com/grow-your-social-network-but-not-on-facebook/
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