Seowoo Park- Blog Assignment 2

It has been more than four years that logging in a Facebook, whenever I have the intermission, became one of my habits. For me, the Facebook is a very sensitive medium communicating with my friends and a society, because I mostly learn my friends’ lives and the news of the world such as popular TV shows, trendy clothes, and serious issues via the Facebook. I called it a ‘very sensitive medium’ because an aftereffect of posting words on the wall is immense; a video of a pretty girl singing and dancing made her an online star whom a hundred thousand of people loved, and a guy who posted a piece of writing about how uncivil bereaved families of Sewol sunken vessel’s victims was heavily criticized by thousands of people. Initially, however, the medium was not necessarily for every person in the world according to a piece of article I found in the New York Times in 2005, named “Facebook.com Goes to High School.” The Facebook, of which now everyone is user, was at very first a “fancy electronic version of the whiteboard that students often mount on their doors to leave and receive messages.” Mark Zuckerberg, who was the founder of the Facebook, got an idea to transform ubiquitous college directories of incoming freshmen into interactive sites. His site allowed any student with a university e-mail address to register, create an online profile and invite friends to communicate through the profile. It was an interesting piece of information because it showed a choppy origin of the Facebook.

Although users of the Facebook temporarily were only limited to college students, now it is very spread-out communication in the world. I even found an article from Project Muse, called “Facebook of the Dead,” described as “Facebook now exists as the capital city of the Internet Age.” The Facebook’s effect was more enormous than I used to think because it was “significantly more than the time given to Google sites, which include YouTube, and more than double all the hours spent on Amazon, eBay, Tumblr, ESPN, Wikipedia and Twitter combined.” Another article from ProQuest called “Facebook Flagged on Privacy Issue” issued in 2010 dealt with with troubles due to various and numerous users of the Facebook, saying that, “Facebook had neglected to include several crucial privacy features.” As the Facebook nowadays has risen up as a main communicating source in the world, it also has to face the most common online issue.