Dystopian Technology in relation to Facebook

Part One:

The communication technology that I chose to look at for this blog assignment was Facebook. Originally, Facebook was looked at as a college, online community network that connected people from other colleges. Over the course of a couple years, Facebook is not just used by college students anymore. In fact anyone can have one. In my hometown, it is not unusual that many high school students have Facebooks, even though when I was a Senior, Facebook was taboo for us to have at that young of an age. With this wide range of freedom with the creation of profiles, many people add people to their "friends list" without even knowing the person. The danger in this is that these strangers can have access to your personal information and can look at your photos that you have on your profile. With such limited privacy on these online profiles, the worry that your information can fall into the wrong hands is very high.

Part Two:

We are able to relate concepts from 1984 to the ways of Facebook. One concept from the novel that can be related to Facebook is the idea of surveillance cameras. Because Facebook has such a free range of people accessing your personal information, it is impossible to know who exactly is looking at your profile at a specific moment in time. Sometimes, people tend to “Untag” photos and videos of themselves that they feel may be considered inappropriate in the eyes of relatives and certain jobs that may come across them. The fear that these people may have a negative connotation about the person at hand makes the person with the profile alter what behavior is displayed as opposed to who they really are. This concept of shaping a modeled behavior is also shown in relation to the surveillance cameras as well in 1984. The idea that “Big Brother” can be watching Winston at any time is a scary thought, and they therefore have to act a certain way. For example in Chapter 3 of the novel, people ages 30 and up need to wake up early and exercise; they must have a smile on their faces because they have to. Creating a persona that people want to see is exactly what Facebook is doing.

Part Three:

Overall, I feel as though our society can be seen as a dystopian society. I feel that having a Facebook account means that even if I'm not watched by the government, I am still being watched by the all of my friends that I have on Facebook. Thus, with the use of these online social communities, it is vital to make good decisions as to what you are willing to have people find out about you on these sites. Good rule of thumb, if you wouldn’t want one particular person to see something you put on your profile, it is probably not a good thing to post at all. To some extent, I find that the negative aspects of these social networks outweigh the good because once information is put out over the internet, more times than not, it will stay there forever in some way, shape, or form.