Facebook Stalker - Shaping My Virtual Network and Physical Connections

Through a computer, we form relationships, consume information, use it as a vehicle for communication, and as an outlet for expression. While watching the movie “Noah”, I found the framing of the video interesting, as it exemplified how our lives revolve around computer screens. While watching, the video I questioned my own behavioural patterns through communication over the internet.

According to Liebes (2003), Herzog describes consumers as “self-aware [and] use media in a goal oriented manner” (p. 39). By assessing my mannerisms online, I argue that these behaviours are not all within my consciousness: as soon as I turn on my computer, I automatically type in my password, open up a tab for my email, log onto Facebook, check for notifications, and then get to work.

Issues outlined by media studies scholars in Columbia, as early as the 1940s, remain “alive” today. “From hegemonic to narcotizing power of media to their ability to maintain social norms and shape popular taste” (Simonson & Weimann, 2003, p.13), modern technology and digital platforms are still argued as demonstrating these ideas. Private uses and public morality using technology is demonstrated in this film, through what the user does on his computer, and what activity he makes publically available other people in his network.

Castells (2005) speaks to the “network society” which form relational power imbalances between “nodes”. I related these nodes to “articulations” and networks to “assemblages” in Slack and Wise’s discussion of territorializing and de-territorializing connections through lines of tangential forces, between articulations in greater assemblages (2005). These ideational theories are described through a physical process, much like the materiality and phenomentality of media described by Hansen (2006). He claims that “media conditions our situations” (p. 298) and requires us to adopt a new way of thinking and speaking. As our “sensory and perceptual” (p. 299) human experience is altered, I argue that Facebook shifts connections from physical to virtual to a stronger physical/emotional bond with others.

The mediated lens that Facebook creates, demonstrates this process of a "cyborg" manifestation between human and machine. Social media sites affect our physical perception, as altered by the computer/cellphone screens, and the social construction of how people present themselves, or our own perception of self.

By arguing that all “human life is mediation..a concrete actualization of the living via exteriorization in an environment, the medium” (p. 301), Hanson supports Slack’s claim that “technologies do not exist as tools..wholly outside and indecent of our bodies” (2012, p. 150). They both link “the social and the material” (Lievrouw, 2014, p.26) to strongly tie the development of technology to that of a human being.

I admit to periodically being a "Facebook stalker". I look up profiles on Facebook and go review people's profile pictures as if they would indicate what that person is like, and who they are – a type of personality assessment based on profile pictures alone!

Packer and Wiley claim that the “acceleration in the mobility of people, goods, money, and media…deepen…the interconnection and interdependence of disparate networks, places, processes, and social relations” (2012, p. 109). By discussing communication as a material process in the production of space and place, these virtual networks have to potential of creating material value in physical and emotional connections to other people.