Seera Akra - Summaries and questions

Heffernan, V. (2009, August 26). Medium: Facebook exodus. The New York Times.


Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/magazine/

30FOB-medium-t.html

Summary of: Facebook Exodus

This article discusses the reason for which some little percentage of people is leaving Facebook. The reasons put by interviewed people who left Facebook could be summed by the following: feeling used in commerce, feeling followed and watched, going public, not getting enough satisfaction of direct socialization, losing identity, being discouraged by others, ownership of Facebook user’s involvement into the site, wasting time, and getting tired and bored.

I have some questions inspired by this article:


1) Are these minor behaviors or do they signal a more similar behavior in the future causing a return to other ways of socializing?

2) What makes people so indulged in Facebook that they wait till they realize that they are exposed to the public and decide to stop using it?

3) Does the taste of social experience differ from a person to another? And how does this affect people’s use of facebook?

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Hodgkinson, T. (2008, January 14). With friends like these [Article History].


Retrieved from The Guardian website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/

2008/jan/14/facebook

Summary of: With Friends like These

The article is aimed to prove that Facebook is made by people who show us that Facebook helps us socialize better and gain more friends, while in fact Facebook sentences us to isolation and usies us as consumers to commercialize products. It is so popular that it cannot be removed from the society and it is concerned with quantity of friends rather than quality. People responsible for creating Facebook have neoconservative libertarianism minds and one of them is a smart and rich uber-capitalist and futurist philosopher Peter Thiel. He also believes in value of virtual things rather than physical, thus he made PayPal, an e-commerce that free money from flow restrictions. He made Facebook to satisfy this purpose too and make trading free depending on people imitating each other by using Facebook. Another person who has an influence is Jim Breyer and he was part of PayPal which is related to the CIA, which makes Facebook a spying tool for the CIA. Facebook privacy policy also proves the latter.

Here are my questions:

1) Why should the virtual world just for being so?
2) Is it intentional that the writing of Facebook policies is very small and hard to read?